


those who remain

by sevenfoxes



Category: Captain America (Movies), Captain America - All Media Types, Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Werewolf, Arranged Marriage, F/M, M/M, Miscarriage, Mourning, Multi, Past Peggy Carter/Steve Rogers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-09-01
Updated: 2016-11-16
Packaged: 2018-08-12 11:43:18
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 26,914
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7933324
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sevenfoxes/pseuds/sevenfoxes
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The declaration is made by the council on the eighth full moon of the year.</p><p>“Steve,” Bucky says plaintively after he’s delivered the news.  His body's still shaking a bit from the shift out of the wolf, the same way his body shivers when Steve touches him.  Pets his ruff when he’s turned.  The moonlight lights up the forest in a sad, lonely sort of way, and Steve wonders what it will be like when he loses Bucky as well.  “Talk to me.”</p><p>The truth is there’s not much to say.</p><p>On the next full moon, Bucky and Sharon will be bonded to join the two Eastern packs.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. i. steve

**Author's Note:**

  * For [blackglass](https://archiveofourown.org/users/blackglass/gifts).



> A couple things:
> 
> 1) There is _a lot_ of talk about the past Peggy/Steve in this, and I don't pull any punches. I love Peggy  & I love Sharon. Neither of their relationships with Steve is getting belittled or diminished.  
> 2) I've changed a lot of the familial relationships in this fic.  
> 3) Although there is arranged marriage/bonding, there is no dub/non con.  
> 4) I do reference alpha/beta/omega dynamics but it has to do with hierarchy and zero to do with sexual dynamics. This is not an ABO fic.

 

 

The declaration is made by the council on the eighth full moon of the year.

“Steve,” Bucky says plaintively after he’s delivered the news. His body's still shaking a bit from the shift out of the wolf, the same way his body shivers when Steve touches him. Pets his ruff when he’s turned. The moonlight lights up the forest in a sad, lonely sort of way, and Steve wonders what it will be like when he loses Bucky as well. “Talk to me.”

The truth is there’s not much to say.

On the next full moon, Bucky and Sharon will be bonded to join the two Eastern packs.

 

\--

 

Steve hasn’t seen Sharon since she was seventeen.

(It had been the been the day of Peggy’s wake, and Sharon had spent most of it huddled in Peggy’s room - in _his_ room - away from the mass of wellwishers; he had discovered her after fleeing himself, the prospect of one more sad look or gentle touch on his shoulder sending him careening to the edge of sanity. She’d been staring out the window, curled into the corner near Peggy’s bedside table, Peggy’s creams and watch still lying on its surface.

He’d tugged at the tie round his neck that felt more like a noose and sat down across from her, silent for hours.)

Sharon is the youngest of the Carter girls, and the only one of the four that shares their mother’s fair looks. Blonde hair and pale skin, a delicate bone structure that belies strength rather than weakness. She’s also the only Carter sister who had been born in America, later fostered by her maternal uncle as a presumptive heir to his pack in the South, to cement her father’s ambitious expansion into the States.

Her sisters had grown up primarily in London, and while Peggy had adored England, she had resented the separation from Sharon. She had complained at length about it to Steve; Peggy hadn’t been overly close with her older sisters, the twins more than a decade older than Peggy and not particularly enamoured with the idea of a younger sister. Sharon, before she was shipped off to live with Howard, was the sister Peggy hadn't had for the first six years of her life. Her loss had been devastating to Peggy.

But in the later years, their father had relented, sending Peggy to spend her summers in South Carolina with her younger sister at their uncle’s estate. It had been at that very estate that Steve had met Peggy for the first time, fallen in love with her, and eventually run off with her.

The twins had bonded into European packs, both advantageous marriages that had solidified the Carter pack’s hold on large swathes of England, Scotland, and France.

Peggy had been Steve’s. Peggy had been Steve’s, and Steve had been Peggy’s, and for a short, blissful time, he’d been unimaginably happy.

 

\--

 

Fury looks unsurprised but also displeased when Steve shows up in DC to challenge the council’s orders. As an ex-regent in self-imposed exile, Steve has no standing to challenge anything, but Fury still agrees to see him, despite the irritated looks of Hill, whose patience for wolves who don’t know their place is thin.

“It’s been over four years,” Fury says. “Your pack needs more alphas, and the Carter women tend to produce them.” Fury leans back against his desk, a mask of calm annoyance plastered on his face. All the packs in the Americas are run out of this building, a fortress hidden in the outskirts of the city. “Despite what you think, I’m not doing this to punish you.”

Steve bristles. “Feels like it.”

If he were any other man, Steve thinks Fury might laugh. But Fury is one of the most feared and respected alphas in the western hemisphere, one of the few to survive the pack wars in the 80s, and despite Steve’s hesitancy to trust the man, he’s always respected him.

“Your choice pushed this, Rogers. You chose to abdicate your position in the pack.” It had been nearly three years since Steve had passed the regency down to Bucky, disappearing into the woods of upstate New York, struggling to live with the loss of Peggy. “Bucky’s the last alpha left east of the Mississippi other than you, and if he dies without an heir, the packs will descend into chaos fighting over the territory. The longer he waits, the more vulnerable he is. Meanwhile, Rumlow’s been eyeing the Stark land for years. Would you rather she ended up there?”

The thought makes a wave of anger roll through Steve’s body. Rumlow is a vicious, honourless man, and Steve wouldn’t send an enemy to be bonded with him, let alone Sharon. But losing Bucky is a horror that Steve hasn’t truly contemplated until this moment.

“This isn’t fair to either of them.”

This time, Fury does chuckle. “Since when have you ever thought life is _fair_ , Rogers?”

Peggy would want her sister safe. She’d want her with a man like Bucky, not that it makes it any easier to swallow. There’s absolutely no way that Steve will let Harrison Carter barter Sharon to Rumlow, but he’s also not willing to let Fury barter Bucky’s future.

But their time has always been borrowed. Between Steve’s abdication and their non-existent lineage, the sore lack of alphas, their pack is weak. They breed strong wolves in the north, but their society is built on a foundation of arcane rules, who can and who cannot rule, who owns what stretch of green land and blue water, and without a regent and a lineage, Steve’s pack is in a perilous position.

The hardest part of this is knowing Steve has put Bucky here, at this precipice.

“You know Margaret was like a daughter to me,” Fury says. Fury had once been close to the Carter patriarch, and while Fury’s softness for the Carter girls is well known, his deep, familial affection for Peggy had been quieter and more secretive. Peggy hadn’t had a close relationship with her parents, and looked upon Fury more as a father than the one who shared her blood. “And while I don’t approve of what you two did, I knew you made her happy, which is why I forgave your trespass of our laws.” His eye narrows. “I won’t do it again.”

For regent alphas, bonding without the consent of the Council is a crime punishable by exile. Even death, if the trespass is great enough. It makes a shiver run up his spine; he knows the danger he has put Bucky into.

“She wouldn’t want this for you,” Fury says. “What you’re doing now isn’t out of deference to her memory, it’s out of a desire to punish yourself. But I won’t let you punish your pack - her pack - because of it.”

Steve snarls. “Arranged bonding is fucking archaic.”

Fury shakes his head motioning for the door. “It may be archaic, but it’s our law. Your pack needs a lineage.” Steve’s hands begin to shake. “Don’t interfere with this, Rogers.”

Steve nearly rips the door off its hinges slamming it shut behind him.

 

\--

 

They run together every night before the moon, though Steve tells himself it’s better to just cut the gangrenous limb off, to stop this before he passes beyond something that will break him when he loses it.

(He knows he’s already passed that point, that he passed it long ago.)

“It won’t change anything,” Bucky tells him solemnly as they lie in the grass naked, like it’s something he can promise. “You know why I’m doing this.”

Steve shakes his head angrily. He feels petulant and hurt, a potent combination for him; loss has always made him the weakest version of himself. “Don’t. I don’t want to hear how you’re doing this for me.”

That gets an angry snarl out of Bucky. “I’m not doing this for _you_ , you selfish fuck.” Bucky’s anger is the kind that boils out of nowhere, that explodes out of the calm dark that is Bucky’s typical laidback nature. But while it burns hot and furious, it also fades fast. Bucky’s face softens near immediately, his hand coming up to drag through his hair roughly. “God,” he huffs. “Christ, you think I wouldn’t give anything to --”

Steve understands. His love has always been selfish.

Bucky’s has always been selfless.

 

\--

 

Despite the occasion, the bonding is small and intimate. Normally, the joining of two packs is an event to which the entirety of both packs is invited. Instead, there’s only a handful of witnesses, a few pack elders and several members of the council, including Hill who comes in Fury’s stead. Bucky had told Steve to stay away, but Steve’s never been able to stop himself from walking into the knife just to feel the pain, so he shows up late, as the last of the elders are arriving. Slips in unnoticed, letting the dark shadows of the trees hide his face.

The ceremony is held down near the river close to dusk, the river still warm from the sun.

It takes Steve a second to recognize Sharon, standing ankle deep in the river in the light, in a white dress that shifts around her knees as the wind picks up. She’s always been a pretty girl, but she’s blossomed into a beautiful young woman since he last saw her: high cheek bones, flared hips, long legs.

Looking at her, he knows why Harrison would have thought of her as currency, though it forces a thread of anger along Steve’s spine. He’s always cared for Sharon; he remembers her more as the unsure teenager who always looked so desperate for company than the self-assured woman she looks like now.

(Steve wonders bitterly what she looks like to Bucky now, if he’s cataloguing the same changes in her that Steve is. Bucky’s never had a particular type in women - blonde, brunette, redhead, shy, bold, brash... Bucky’s tastes always ran as wild and unpredictable as he had been in his youth. They rarely talked about Sharon after Peggy’s death, but Steve knows that Bucky’s relationship with her had never strayed to romance when they had been younger. Maybe if she looked as she does now, beautiful and clever beyond her years, things may have been different.)

As if summoning him through thought alone, Steve watches as Bucky joins her, taking her hand and guiding her out of the deeper water, bringing her closer to land so they can start the ceremony.

One foot on land, one foot in water. One-half human, one-half wolf.

Steve blends into the small gathering of people huddled around Bucky and Sharon on the shore, his heart trying to to beat straight through his chest as he watches Bucky carefully wind Sharon’s hair around his fingers, tangling it into his fist so he can shift it over and bare her shoulder. Bucky’s other hand drops to Sharon’s hip, sliding around to the small of her back, an open palm to keep her pressed up against him.

Steve can smell the tension radiating off of Sharon, though her face remains placid. There’s no way Bucky can’t smell it too, so it’s not surprising when Steve sees Bucky run his thumb carefully over her spine in soft, small circles, the same thing Steve’s felt against his own back more times than he can count. Bucky leans forward, letting his nose brush up against the line of her pale shoulder, letting himself breathe in her scent a moment.

Bucky half shifts, enough that his teeth sharpen minutely, enough that they break through Sharon’s skin with only a gentle pressure. Steve can smell the blood before he sees it, small rivulets running down her shoulder and staining the edge of her pretty dress pressed against her breast.

_Bucky._

Steve sucks in a shocked, stuttered breath at the sound of Sharon’s voice in his head.

 

\--

 

It takes her nearly a half-hour to approach him, even though he’s been watching her track him around the edge of the forest. It hadn’t taken her long to extricate herself from the intense conversation Bucky and Howard are still having with Sam and Wanda near the water.

He’s embarrassed that she gets the drop on him, his eyes trained on the hand Sam has on Bucky’s shoulder, just shy of the blood stain marring the white cotton collar of Bucky’s shirt. One second he’s alone at the mouth of the forest and the next she’s a few feet off his left side, watching him again curiously.

“Steve,” Sharon says quietly, nervously fiddling with a cattail she’s already yanked the leaves off of. Pushing off the tree, she takes a few steps closer to him, tossing the cattail into the brush.

“Sharon.” He can’t get over how different she looks, how different she _feels_. When he'd found out about the council’s decree, he had still been imagining Sharon as a young girl, too young for this. In some ways, she still is, but he can tell now, standing in front of her, that whatever may have driven her to the choice, she still made one.

It’s a modicum of comfort in the horror of what they’re living through.

“Congratulations,” he says, even though the look on her face is anything but celebratory and Steve’s hurt grows deeper with every passing moment.

Sharon nods as she mumbles a soft thank you. A line of blood drips down from the wound on her neck, the deep puncture mark of one of Bucky’s incisors. Bucky had cleaned the bite after the ceremony had finished, and though it’s slowly beginning to heal, it’s still sluggishly pushing blood out.

Reflexively, he reaches out with the cuff of his sleeve and Sharon jerks back, her eyes wide. It takes a second for Steve to recognize the defensive stance she’s taken, bracing her weight back and low.

She thinks… she thinks he’d hurt her. Touch her in anger.

(The thought horrifies him beyond measure. Steve knows he isn’t the man he once was - the man Sharon remembers from their summers together - and that there are plenty of rumours of him as the wild wolf in the north, but there would never be a version of him that could hurt Sharon, no matter how tangled their web has become. He’s not so far gone as to not realize just how caught Sharon is in all this too; their world has never been kind to women.)

“Just --” he says, motioning to his own neck. Reaching up, she stops her hand before it lands on the bloody wound, carefully reconsidering touching the mess. “Here,” he says, stepping toward her again, pressing the cuff of his sleeve to her neck, letting it soak up the blood.

Sharon’s quiet for a few moments, watching the milling members of their pack talk and drink under the light of the lanterns strung around the trees. She looks up at him, her mouth parting as though she’s about to speak before it snaps shut again, her eyes falling away.

(The blood stain on his cuff never comes out, though he can’t bring himself to throw out the shirt.)

 

\--

 

Steve knows Bucky will wait for him to make the first move, to come to him. This is a familiar dance.

This time, Steve chooses to forget the steps.

It’s time for Steve to stop being selfish.

 

\--

 

A week after the bonding, Steve catches Sharon running up near the western ridge during one of his nightly runs. It’s close to the mouth of the river, right where the edge of the cliffs that fall into the river are steep and rocky.

Like him, her wolf is mostly white, just a single black stripe of fur that trails over her spine and tail. There aren’t many white wolves left anymore; most are muted shades of grey and brown. Bucky is a night-sky black, a strange marking that makes the entirety of his left front leg look near silver.

(Peggy had been the most beautiful auburn colour, deep and rich, with white markings all over her body, like she had been splattered with a paintbrush. Sometimes they had stayed shifted for days at a time, and Steve had spent hours nosing at them.)

Sharon sniffs the ground, exploratory, pausing at the top of the hill to stare down at the river and valley below. This place isn’t new to her - she’d spent the three years Steve had been bonded to Peggy running this land with them and Bucky - but it’s been many years since she last visited, and though the forest doesn’t change much, it must feel different to her now.

(This place had felt different to him after Peggy, like he was experiencing things in a new reality. All the smells had been dimmer, the colours more muted.)

He waits to see Bucky, but there’s no trace of him, no scent in the wind. She’s alone.

Wolves are creatures of habit; though many will wander with a pack, Steve knows that when they run alone, they tend to stick to a small territory, to run the lands that are familiar. He’s run enough with Sharon back when she was younger to know that even within a small pack, she likes the lands she knows. Finds comfort in them. In all the years they ran together as a pack, he only remembers her straying a few times, usually at Bucky or Peggy’s behest, and usually in the south, where she was more adventurous and comfortable.

There’s no reason whatsoever that he should return to this spot, but he finds himself drawn back to it night after night, watching for her, listening for the sound of paws on the fresh dirt.

 

\--

 

It takes three weeks.

“Steve?”

The knocking on Steve’s door gets louder with each passing minute. Steve shoves the pillow over top of his head and prays that Bucky gets the fucking hint, even though Steve knows deep in the marrow of his bones that he won’t. Bucky is one of the most stubborn wolves Steve has ever known, and truth be told, he’s been expecting Bucky for ages now, only hoping cynically he’d stay away.

Eventually, Bucky gives up on the door, and Steve can hear the sound of his footsteps on the wraparound porch, stopping in front of the window Steve is grateful he remembered to pull the curtains closed on.

“Steve? Come on.” Bucky sounds pitiful, caught somewhere between guilt and frustration. “Open the fucking door.”

With Bucky’s strength, he could easily break down the heavy door on Steve’s cabin. He could yank up the windows that Steve never bothered to nail shut. But Steve knows he won’t. Bucky’s never taken anything without permission, never pushed across the boundaries that Steve has set for them.

This time he sets them for Bucky’s sake, whether he realizes it or not.

“ _Please_ ,” Bucky begs, and Steve can feel him inside the back of his head, all the fear and guilt and anger and desire that Bucky is sending out in an endless, overwhelming loop.

 _Go home to your wife_ , Steve echoes back, unable to help himself. He knows before speaking the words that they will hurt Bucky, but the tidal wave of pain he feels coming off Bucky is like a knife slicing through Steve’s gut. The regret is instantaneous.

There is no movement for a few moments, just the sound of the wood groaning under the weight of Bucky’s feet, the wind coming down off the Adirondacks that whistles as it shoves through the small gaps under the doors.

Then footsteps away. Heavy, dragging, like Bucky can’t even be bothered to lift his feet. Steve feels like shit, like the lowest of the low. He’d thought he’d hit rock bottom, but this is a new depth, the last of the light above him disappearing.

It takes nearly an hour for Steve to lose the scent of Bucky outside the cabin. Steve gets up, makes a pot of coffee, puts beans on the stove, and starts slicing bread for toast. He eats quietly, puts the dirty dishes in the sink overflowing with them, and climbs back into the bed with the fading smell of Bucky still lingering in it.

Bucky doesn’t come back to his door the next day.

Or the day after.

Or the day after that.

 

\--

 

Steve is waiting for Sharon up on the ridge, hidden in the forest when a streak of black comes flying out from the east, paws chewing up the distance quickly. The wolf’s legs are a blur of movement, but Steve can still see the silver streak of the left front. And even if he couldn’t, he knows the smell of this wolf anywhere.

Bucky comes skidding to a stop in the grass, and Steve feels enough of what’s screaming in the back of his mind to know that Bucky is entirely aware of Steve’s presence, that he came looking for him. Bucky tips his head back, scenting the valley, and Steve steps back quietly, trying to slip away.

Bucky’s head snaps around the moment Steve moves, and for the briefest second both of them freeze, their eyes meeting across the distance.

Then Bucky launches himself toward Steve.

The decision to run is reflexive, and Steve spins with a light grace he rarely manages these days.

Steve’s always been a bit faster than Bucky, but tonight seems to have put speed on Bucky’s side, because it only takes a minute before Steve can feel Bucky approach his flank, throwing his body into Steve’s hard enough to send them both flying.

The sound Bucky makes when his chest hits Steve’s is loud and hollow, the two of them going tumbling into the brush, Steve’s leg thumping into a tree hard enough to smart. Although Steve is a little bigger than Bucky in human form, as a wolf, Bucky is the larger of the two, especially in weight. But the weight makes him slow, and soon enough Steve’s wormed himself overtop of Bucky.

Bucky shifts as they struggle and suddenly there are very human hands twisting into Steve’s ruff, yanking wildly to keep Steve’s snapping jaws from landing on skin. Reflexively, Steve begins to shift as well, his body responding to Bucky’s change, and suddenly Bucky’s hands are biting into the flesh of his neck instead of fur, one reaching down to grab his hip.

“You _asshole_ ,” Bucky hisses, and the blinding anger and pain that Steve can feel through him nearly takes his breath away. The shock lets Bucky snake the upper hand, and again, instinct takes over, making Steve buck and twist, trying to pry Bucky loose.

There are twigs and rocks digging into Steve’s bare back as he grapples with Bucky. It’s the sort of roughhouse they used to engage in when they were young pups, too strong and too reckless given their power. They’d been drunk on it at the time: all that strength and power, the quickness of the healing. It had led to a lot of broken bones that had healed quickly, a lot of bruises and blood spilt.

Steve knows that this could go there, too. They’ve never hurt each other intentionally before, but the grip they have on each other is mean. He doesn’t want to start that tonight. Not ever.

Instead, Steve goes nearly boneless underneath Bucky. He tilts his head, baring his neck in submission. In all their years, Steve has never submitted, never backed down from anything, including fights with Bucky. Alphas do not submit, they do not back down, but Steve has always been a terrible alpha.

“Wh--” Bucky sputters in shock, pulling back. It doesn’t take much effort to flip them, to have Bucky flat on his back. He gets a hand in Steve’s hair, but doesn’t move to pull it; the fight, it seems, has gone out of Bucky, too.

There’s still anger there, though. Anger in his eyes and anger in the back of Steve’s head, chanting at Steve like a dark hymn. Bucky lets Steve kiss him though, still opens his mouth when Steve presses his tongue against Bucky’s lips. Steve grinds down into Bucky and the wave of desire that floods into his mind is like the warm smell of home, a pleasure that is familiar and welcome.

But it’s different, too. There are parts of Bucky walled off to Steve, something he’s never felt before. And he can smell Sharon all over Bucky, the gentle smell of both her human form and her wolf. He presses his face into the bond bite she’s left on his shoulder, mouths at it, his tongue pressing over the divots in Bucky’s flesh.

 _I love you_ , Steve thinks, and Bucky’s body goes completely slack underneath him.

 

\--

 

Steve may fall asleep the sound of Bucky’s ragged breathing beside him, but he never wakes up to it. The morning always brings an empty bed and the lingering smell of Bucky’s skin in the sheets.

Steve doesn't wait for Sharon in the westlands anymore. He doesn’t need to. Instead, Sharon haunts his home, her scent caught in Bucky's clothes and hair, on the skin Steve brings bare under his hands. Sometimes he can smell her in his bed long after Bucky’s scent had faded.

It reminds him of a time before the half-life he’s living now; the warmth of a woman, of belonging to someone wholly his. There’s an echo of contentment to it, the knowledge that Bucky has someone other than the wreck that Steve has become, something Bucky sorely deserves. The bitterness Steve once felt has been eaten up by something else, something he doesn’t quite understand. Something that makes him want to run in the west at night, to see Sharon run and hunt, to watch her.

There isn’t a single part of Steve that doesn’t know that this is wrong. They’ve let Sharon wander into something dark; bonds are sacred, meant to be shared between two wolves, and two wolves only. What they have done is abhorrent by their laws.

But he still lets Bucky step over the threshold, still welcomes him into his bed, still fucks him with the smell of Sharon on his skin. It frightens him how much he’s grown to like it, how the smell of her gets him just that little bit harder, makes his hips go brutal enough that Bucky lets out the deepest, neediest whines.

Tonight, Bucky reeks of her. He’s got thin scratch marks on his shoulder that taste like her when Steve laps at them.

He can’t help the thought that cycles through his head. _Does she know you come here?_

“Don’t,” Bucky growls, and the sound settles into Steve’s bones.

 

\--

 

The last person Steve expects to see at his door is Sharon; he’s only seen her as a wolf since the night down at the river. It’s enough of a shock that Steve stands dumbfounded in the doorframe until she lifts an eyebrow and asks if she can come in.

(He can smell Bucky on her. Over the bond bite on her neck, behind her knees, and along her arm.)

Steve’s embarrassed as Sharon surveys the spartan space of his small cabin. He’s perfectly aware of how he lives, what it looks like. It’s a world away from the warm home that he had shared with Peggy, the home his parents had kept until they were killed.

The home she now lives in with Bucky.

But there’s no pity on Sharon’s face. No anger either, which is surprising given what she must know goes on here. Steve’s gotten used to the smell, so it’s more faint to him than it would be to another wolf, and she’s the only one to step into his home in the last four years other than Bucky. She has to smell it.

She looks through the doorway, into Steve’s bedroom. The sheets are still unmade, though it’s been long enough that Bucky’s sweat has dried.

“This needs to stop,” Sharon says bluntly.

“What?” It’s more disbelief than denial.

“I know what you do with him,” she says. “He doesn’t lie to me, but we haven’t talked about it either. Tries to be considerate, not come home smelling of you, but he’s terrible at hiding his thoughts.”

“Sharon,” Steve says, trying to find the words to explain what he’s been doing, to explain himself.

Sharon holds up a hand. “I didn’t take this bonding to hurt you. Or him,” she says plainly. “It’s no secret what you and Bucky are to one another, and I had no desire to step between you. I took it because I knew what waited for me on the other side of my father’s scheming.” Though she tries to hide it, there’s an edge of fear in her voice. “I’d have chosen any match before Rumlow, and I wasn’t about to leave my pack to him either.”

Steve had been the only regent in the history of his pack not to arrange interpack bondings to expand territories, a legacy he’d forced Bucky to promise to keep before he’d handed it over to him. Just for this very reason.

“I know you hate me--”

“ _Sharon_ ,” Steve grinds out, caught between offense and horror. He remembers the way she had flinched away from him at the river. Given Steve has spent the better part of three months sleeping with her bondmate, he shouldn’t be surprised at the assumption, but it hurts none the less. Once, they had been family, and despite Steve’s selfishness, he’s never meant her harm. Truth is, he cares for her. Truth is… it’s far more complicated than that. “I don’t hate you. I’ve never hated you.”

She takes a deep, shuddering breath, and for the first time, Steve wishes he could listen in to whatever is going on in Sharon’s head.

“I miss her too, you know.” Sharon finally looks angry, her eyes glassy with tears. “I loved her. I loved her before you knew she was even alive. She was mine before she was yours, and I miss her every day.”

“Don’t,” Steve chokes out. He never brings Peggy into this place; not her name, not her smell, not even a photo. He’d left everything of hers in the basement of the house, safe.

But Sharon doesn’t stop. “I know she’d want you happy. Loved. Which is why I don’t care. I don’t care what you and Bucky do up here. I don’t care about… what you did before.”

She knows, then. Everything. Steve wasn’t sure how Bucky would explain the mark on his hip, but she knows.

For a while, Steve wondered if he would feel better if Sharon knew what he and Bucky have been up to in the woods, if the guilt would lessen knowing that Sharon chose to let Bucky leave, chose to give Steve that kindness. He knows now, unequivocally, that he absolutely fucking does not feel better. His betrayal feels worse.

“But Bucky’s not coming back here,” Sharon says, her voice shaking though she’s clearly trying to make it calm and authoritative, and for a moment, Steve’s heart stops beating. “Do you even know what it does to him? Sneaking out here? I know he doesn’t love me like he does you, but he’s a good man, and I care about him.”

Steve knows the truth though: Bucky has feelings for Sharon that go far beyond the quiet, learned affection of an arranged bonding. He’s seen it in the way Bucky speaks of her, how her scent lingers on him in a way that wouldn’t if they only fucked for the lunar cycle, trying to get a pup on her. Steve can hear it in Bucky’s mind, the way it wanders to her when he’s happy, when he needs something safe to hold on to.

She squares her shoulders and stares him down. “It’s fucking killing him, Steve. I think it has been for years. He won’t talk about it, but I can see it on his face when he comes back with the smell of you all over him.”

In retrospect, he knows the anger that bubbles up inside of him is borne entirely of guilt. “It’s none of your--”

“It _is_ ,” Sharon hisses. “It’s different when you’re bonded, and you know that.” Steve’s eyes shift down to the side of her neck, at the bonding bite Bucky has left on her. “I _feel it_ , too. I can feel his sorrow. I know you can, too. It fucking hurts me, Steve.”

With Peggy, he’d felt everything. It’s different for each bonded pair; it’s trust and love, the depth of vulnerability you’re willing to share with the wolf you’re bonded to. Sometimes, it had felt like he’d been living in Peggy’s head, inside her body. He loved the way he made her feel more than anything else in the world.

“I’m sorry,” Steve says, and it’s the first time since this all started that he’s truly felt shame. Not only for what he’s done to Sharon, but to Bucky as well. They may have all tacitly consented to what they’ve done, but Steve feels like a thief none the less.

She lets out a deep sigh, a sound far too old and exhausted for such a young woman. He forgets sometimes that she is barely twenty-two. “I just want it to stop. I want him to stop hurting, I want to stop hurting.” Her eyes catch Steve’s, a brilliant green he doesn’t think he’s ever noticed before. “And I know you won’t listen, but I want you to stop hurting too.”

The words that follow take his breath away.

“If you want to see Bucky, you come to the house.”


	2. ii. bucky

Fury calls Bucky down to DC with an official missive. When Bucky arrives at Fury’s chambers, he’s shocked to find Howard Stark sitting in one of the leather seats across from Fury.

“Sit,” Fury tells him, motioning toward the seat beside Howard.

Howard looks like he’s aged a few decades in the last five years; the losses of his life have clearly taken a toll on the man, but his decline over the last year in particular has been shocking. Though he raised Sharon like a daughter, Bucky knows he had also been exceptionally close to Peggy, and her death had been yet another tragedy he’d had to bear.

The missive had been vague, carefully worded, a simple request to meet to discuss the northeastern pack. It had put Bucky on edge, and now, sitting in a room with the head of the Council and the regent of the southern pack, Bucky is filled with a sense of dread.

“I’ve made Sharon my heir,” Howard says, breaking the awkward silence. It doesn’t come as much of a shock to Bucky; most had assumed after the death of Maria and Tony that Howard had fostered his niece as a possible heir. Howard is the last of the Stark lineage, and his sister, Amanda, had birthed nothing but girls with Harrison Carter. Female regencies are rare, but not unheard of. “My doctor tells me I have another six months at most. Probably less. After, regency of the southern territory will fall to Sharon.”

Bucky’s jaw sets. “What the hell is this about?” he asks, even though he now knows why he’s been called before the Head of Council. It’s been a long time coming for a regent of Bucky’s age.

“Listen,” Fury starts, his fingers folded together as though he’s about to pray, “I’m perfectly aware of your situation.” He doesn’t elaborate on this, and for a moment, Howard looks puzzled, clearly unaware of Bucky’s entanglement with Steve. “But I need to think of what is right for your pack, something you need to start thinking about, too.”

Bucky bristles. “What is that supposed to mean?”

“It’s time to secure the legacy of your pack, son. Regents are only as strong as their lineage, and you have none. There is no succession whatsoever, and I’d prefer to avoid another power struggle under my watch.”

Shaking his head, Bucky lets out an angry exhale. He fucking hates the politics of it all, the control he’s had to give up over his own life to ensure Steve’s safety, to ensure the safety of his pack. His family.

“A few weeks ago, it was brought to my attention that Sharon’s father had begun negotiations with Rumlow regarding the future of the southern territory,” Howard adds, his voice filled with an angry venom. “And part of those negotiations included Sharon.”

Bucky’s stomach flips. He’s known Sharon since she was a pup; pack business between the north and south meant that Bucky and Steve had visited Howard’s estate frequently over the years with Steve’s parents before their deaths, and although the age gap between them had seemed more significant in their youth, he and Steve had always been fond of the fearless girl whose bark was only marginally worse than her bite.

By her early teens, Bucky counted Sharon as a friend, like a little sister who reminded him so much of Steve when he’d been young. Stubborn, mulish, selfless and kind.

After Peggy’s bonding, Sharon spent a considerable amount of time in the north visiting, running the borderlands with them as she grew into her wolf, learned to control and harness the shift. But in the wake of Peggy’s death, he’s only seen her a handful of times, mostly tense Council meetings in DC with barely a word spoken between them. He doesn’t know much of the woman she’s become, but he does know that she’s a beautiful wolf, blessed with the same grace and kindness that Bucky had admired in Peggy. Bucky has no doubt she’ll be an exceptional regent, though she’ll face more battles being so young. And being a woman.

“If she’s your heir, she has to consent to a bonding, especially anything requiring the merging of packs. As regent, she’ll have even more power,” Bucky says. “Harrison won’t be able to negotiate on her behalf if she’s a regent.”

“Which is why they’re moving quickly, hoping to cement it before I pass. Hell, even as regent in the south, I’m not sure she could reject her father and Rumlow without sparking a war between the packs. You really don’t understand my brother-in-law.” Howard laughs wearily. “He’d sell Sharon to Rumlow in a heartbeat, and you know how I feel about that fucking family.”

Harrison Carter’s greatest sorrow in life was that his bonding had bore no sons, only daughters. But Harrison soon learned the value of alpha girls, of expansions through bonding. Living through the fallout of Peggy’s bonding and her death had made Bucky realize how much he loathes that fucking man.

Howard’s anger is potent, and Bucky can see why Howard had been such a feared wolf in his youth. “I have no more living heirs. Even if Harrison was to bond Sharon to Rumlow without my consent or hers, the territory would pass to her upon my death. And to him.” His fingers tighten on the armrests of his chair. “I’d kill Rumlow myself, but it would only put Sharon at greater risk with a powergrab in his territory.”

“You can’t stop this?” Bucky asks Fury.

“Harrison Carter has too many friends on the Council. They’d have no compunctions about overruling me and selling her to Rumlow for the rewards he and Harrison are likely promising them,” Fury explains.

“So you want to sell her to me instead,” Bucky seethes.

Howard’s eyes snap up, staring Bucky down. “I would never do that to Sharon. Ever.” His voice is firm, bordering on an anger that looks like it’s eating up the last of his strength. “She’s aware that I’m here, speaking with you, and I’d never enter her into a bonding against her will. She knows that the only way to remove this threat is to remove the option of a bonding with another pack entirely.”

“This isn’t just about Sharon, either.” Fury adds, leaning forward until his weight is braced on his knees. Even at his age and missing an eye, Fury is a force to be reckoned with; he is one of the most powerful wolves in the world. “You must understand how dangerous your position is. Your clan has no lineage, no alphas to replace you if you were to fall. You’re weak, and any alpha that was to take over your pack....”

Everything inside of Bucky twists up into a horrific knot. Bucky had never wanted a regency, never wanted the kind of burden that Steve seemed to carry without reservation or complaint. The only reason he had taken it up was that as the last alpha, it had been his duty to the pack. That and any outside alpha would have seen a former regent - self-exile or not - as a threat needing to be dealt with.

So no, Bucky doesn’t need Fury to finish his thought.

“You’re keeping him safe,” Fury says anyway.

Something inside Bucky snaps. Howard may be clueless in what they are asking him to do - what they are asking him to give up - but Fury is not. “Don’t do that. Don’t turn this into me doing Steve a favour. You’re asking me to bond the sister of the wolf he loved. Don’t fucking do that.”

Fury’s face doesn’t budge an inch, but there’s something weirdly soft about the way he’s looking at Bucky. There’s no way he can know about Steve, about what they’ve done. There’s no way Fury would ever ask Bucky to bond with Sharon if he knew just how far they had gone.

Howard steps in. “I took in Sharon because I needed an heir. Even when Tony was a boy, I knew one day he’d be forced to make difficult choices given the climate of the Americas; I was only grateful that he was a boy. Sharon’s position is made more difficult given she is surrounded by packs ruled by backward wolves who see female alphas as property to be bartered away.”

Though Bucky is too young to remember it himself, the rumours of the type of man Howard Stark had been before the pack wars is legendary: a wild wolf bent by ambition and self-interest. It’s hard to reconcile it with the man that Bucky knows now: a solemn, intimidating shadow. He had been a terrible husband and father, and lost both to his carelessness. (They had left Tony and his mother huddled together in Tony’s bed, a silver bullet in each of their foreheads.) Sharon, Bucky suspects, is his redemption. “Though she hasn’t admitted it, I think she’d run before submitting to a bonding arranged by her father.”

Bucky shakes his head, looking outside the window at the dismal, rainy weather. A wolf without a pack never lasts long; it’s why exile is such a potent punishment. “She can’t.”

“No, she can’t,” Fury agrees.

 

\--

 

Bucky can smell the blood from the bite on Sharon’s neck, hear the small whispers of what might be her voice in the back of his head. She’s not letting him in yet, but it’s difficult to keep the bond out when it’s this fresh and this raw, especially if you are unused to the connection. Instead, he tries to coax her out by opening his mind completely to her, low and soft, welcoming.

It’s strange to have someone else inside his home again; Steve hasn’t set foot in it for years, not since his abdication, and Bucky rarely entertains guests. It’s a world away from the happy home he’d grown up in, from the warmth it had carried when Peggy had lived in it with Steve. The sound of Sharon’s bare feet on the floor, how they echo with his, proof of something other than ghosts with him, is soothing.

Her fingers are carded through his, loose, letting him guide her up the stairs and down the hall. But Sharon freezes outside the double doors to his bedroom, her feet firmly planted on the hardwood floor.

“What's wrong?” Bucky asks, taking a half-step back toward her, his hand finding her hip. It’s odd to be touching her like this; it has been an intimacy he has only shared with Steve for the last few years. He had thought the feeling of Sharon under his hand would be foreign, but it’s not.

“I can’t…” Sharon says, and the blank look is replaced with something far more pained.

She has to know that he'd never take anything she isn't willing to give, that a bedding isn't required to seal a bond, that he'll wait until she's ready, no matter how long it takes. He’s never laid with a woman who didn’t want it and he’s sure as fuck not planning to start now.

She shakes her head, and takes a rough breath. It takes a moment for her to compose herself, and the piece of her that he can feel over the bond is a mix of fear, sadness, and embarrassment. It fills Bucky’s mouth with a rotten, sour taste. “Just not that room.”

Bucky remembers finding them there after the guests left, Steve curled up near the bed, half-catatonic, and Sharon…

No, not that room. He understands.

Bucky curls his fingers around hers and nods, gently guiding her down the hall until they reach one of the guest rooms. His old bedroom, the room he slept in every night: from the night Steve’s parents had taken him in until he had moved out the day Steve bonded Peggy.

(Peggy had left her touch all over the house, repainted and redecorated many of the rooms sorely in need of a makeover. But she hadn’t changed Bucky’s room, didn’t throw out the ratty clothes and random shit he hadn’t bothered to take with him to the cabin out in the woods. She’d just dusted, folded his clothes up into his dresser, and told him it was his room to have when he stayed over, which wasn’t enough for her tastes. He’d loved Peggy dearly, and had spent the first few weeks after her death feeling he would trade anything - _anything_ \- to get her back, if only to stop Steve from destroying himself.)

The first few nights he’d been regent, he’d slept here, in his childhood bedroom. The other room had been Steve’s - Steve’s parents’ before that - and it had taken him a while to feel comfortable in its walls. But Bucky had carried a lot of warm memories of that room: as a young boy, tucked in bed with Steve and his parents during the worst of the nights after losing his own family. The way Steve had curled around Bucky after his own parents had passed, filling up the space they left behind. Then the happy smells of Steve and Peggy, a new unexpected family he would come to lose.

Sharon has no happy memories of that room.

“Let’s just sleep,” Bucky says into her temple, pulling back enough to look her in the eye. The relief he sees in her face is palpable in a way that makes his guts clench.

 

\--

 

“They’re not happy,” Sam says, leaning back in his chair far enough that the front legs lift off the floor.

Sharon’s gone out for her nightly run. They’d run together often when they were younger, but Bucky doesn’t take it as a natural invitation to join her now, so when she hadn’t explicitly given him one earlier, he’d let her strip off in the backyard and shift while he’d cracked open a beer in the kitchen and waited for Sam to drop by.

(The lines everywhere are blurred, so Bucky takes nothing without invitation.)

“What does that mean?”

“It means they’re not fucking happy, Bucky. Or more accurately, Rumlow’s fucking livid, and the west wolves that aren’t dead loyal are scared shitless of him, so things are a bit shaky right now.” Sam sighs. “What that means for us, I don’t know. He’s not impulsive, so he could be playing a much longer game. Whatever the case, we need to watch the west.”

It had been easy choosing a second in command when Steve had abdicated and run off, even though Sam doesn’t seem to enjoy the post; Bucky hadn’t much enjoyed it himself when he occupied it under Steve. “It’s not all bad news though,” Sam explains, “because it means they’re still loyal to Sharon down south, otherwise we never would have heard about it in the first place. Rumlow’s testing the waters, but the waters seem ice fucking cold from the sounds of it.”

“Do we need to worry? About the south?” Sam’s levelheaded in a way that Bucky and Steve aren’t, yet another reason Bucky abhors the ridiculous rules governing pack hierarchy. Alphas may be stronger and more resilient, but betas are naturally calmer, tend to be methodical and clearheaded. In a fairer world, Sam would be leading the Northern pack.

“No,” Sam says. “Even if they were likely to turn on Sharon, the southern pack has always loathed Rumlow. He’s hoping they’ll hate you more than than they hate him, but the elders all lived through Tony and Maria, and those that don’t care for Stark sure as hell remember the war. Or lost people in it.”

The civil war had decimated the clans. Steve’s parents had sided with Stark, and while the north’s losses in numbers hadn’t been nearly as great as the south, they had lost the majority of their alphas. They had also rebounded much slower than either the south or the west, and never recovered its alpha population.

“We need to start mixing, though,” Sam says. “There are a few groups we can move down south, and I’ll talk with Jarvis to see if there’s any prospects willing to move north. We need it to stop looking like two territories and start looking like one.”

Bucky locks eyes with Sam. “No bondings,” he says resolutely.

Sam doesn’t even blink, taking a sip of his beer. “Agreed. No bondings.”

(Arranged bondings between merging packs is the norm, but Bucky promised Steve, and even if he didn’t, Bucky has always abhorred the practice.)

One thing that Bucky appreciates in Sam is his ability to enjoy a quiet moment, to let the silence be comforting, not awkward. They sit like that for a few minutes as Sam drinks the rest of his beer, clearly surveying the changes in the house. It’s warmer now, most of Sharon’s things having been unpacked and put away. She’s also taken to fixing a lot of what Bucky has let fall into disrepair; the cabinets have a new coat of white paint, the glass windows in them clean, the floor properly polished, the empty vases filled with flowers and fruit. “How is Sharon doing?”

“She’s good,” Bucky says. “I think.” Truth is, Bucky’s not really sure how Sharon’s doing. She’s quiet, her mood turns warm and cold in a moment, and she’s keeping the bond closed more often than not. In the month since the bonding, he’s felt her settling, maybe even a bit happy. But he doesn’t know her anymore, hasn’t for a while, and he’s careful about making assumptions.

Which has made the fact that the sex is good even more surprising. Easy in a way Bucky hadn’t been expecting given the weight of their history and the fact that it had taken her nearly a week for her to initiate it. He’d expected hesitancy, a coldness because of the distance between them, but found the opposite. Despite the circumstances, it feels lighter, happier; it’s been years since Bucky has been with someone other than Steve, and while he wishes the evolution of his relationship with Sharon had been more natural, the awkwardness that he sometimes feels with her has not translated into their bed.

(It’s harder with Steve. Like dancing on the edge of something pleasurable that wants to swallow you whole, something disconcerting and unknown.)

She’s kind and demanding and bossy and submissive and aggressive… and knows what she wants, despite her youth. Sharon is a strange bundle of contradictions in bed, and Bucky finds himself craving it more and more.

Sam shakes his head, his mouth decidedly stern. “Don’t fuck this up.”

 

\--

 

 _I love you_ , Bucky hears over the bond, and his body goes completely boneless under Steve’s. There’s a branch pressing into the small of his back that aches, and there’s blood under his fingernails that belongs to Steve.

“You can’t fucking _do this_ ,” Bucky says, the words coming out sounding like the grinding of metal against metal. His voice breaks like he’s getting ready to cry, but he’s too angry to cry. Too angry at Steve for abandoning him, too angry at being yanked back and forth.

He’s fucking sick of being at the whims of the Council, the pack, Steve. He wants to be selfish, he wants to let himself feel the bone-deep exhaustion that has been rolling around inside of him since Peggy died.

Steve is hard against Bucky’s belly, and Bucky knows - _knows_ \- this isn’t right. Sharon may have led him to Steve, but she hadn’t consented to this.

There’s confusion in Steve’s eyes as he runs a hand through Bucky’s hair, gripping at the short strands near the base of his skull like he’s hanging on for dear life.

 _I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry_ … just echos into nothingness as Steve kisses him and rocks his cock into Bucky’s belly.

 

\--

 

There's a place down past the mossy banks of the river that Bucky likes to run to. It's a secret place, quiet and hidden, sheltered by rocks that have been eaten away by time and wind.

He comes here sometimes, after he's been to Steve's cabin. He comes here to let the smell leech off him, to let him turn into the man Sharon deserves instead of the selfish wolf he is.

Regents rules with an absence of fear. Alphas are built for control, for domination and decisiveness.

But here. Here the man beneath the wolf can admit that he doesn’t know what the hell he’s doing.

What was clear isn’t anymore.

 

\--

 

“Thanks,” Sharon says as Bucky plops down a plate of toast and eggs in front of her and then slips down to sit in his own chair to eat. She’s reading a copy of _The Sound and the Fury_ she found in his old bedroom, the room that he’s starting to realize he’s come to think of as their room. _Theirs._

They’d never bothered trying to claim the master bedroom after that first night, and Bucky’s surprised to find that he likes sharing this room with Sharon more than returning to the room Steve had vacated. It’s not nearly as big, but the master bedroom had been palatial, so his old room has plenty of space for the both of them without feeling crowded. She’d cleaned it a bit, painted the doors and mouldings, moved in a second dresser and boxed up a few of Bucky’s old things to take into the basement for storage. But, like Peggy, she had left it mostly as Bucky had kept it.

“Oh,” Sharon slurs around a mouthful of toast, and Bucky grins at her decidedly terrible table manners. He likes that the wooden cautiousness between them has passed, that she talks with her mouth full and leaves her sleep shirt and panties on the floor. That she has begun to give her opinion, rather than waiting to be asked. “Are you going to Sam’s today?”

“Yeah, probably.”

“Can you pick up some antibiotic salve from Helen while you’re there?” Sharon puts down the book and takes a sip of her coffee. “I talked to her about it - she’ll know which one I want.”

“You okay?” Bucky can’t help the worry that leeches into his voice. He hadn’t noticed any wounds on her last night, but he’d spent most of his time with his head between her legs. So much time, in fact, that he’d been amused to wake with the taste of her still in his mouth this morning.

Sharon smiles, and for a second the bond opens bright and wide, a wave of happiness rolling through him. It makes a tremor shiver up his spine. “Yeah. It’s for Laura. I was thinking about heading to her place tomorrow to help with the kids. Clint’s going to be down in Charlotte for another week or two, and she’s having trouble moving around now that she’s so close to her due date. Cooper keeps getting into the briar patches, so I told her I’d drop off some extra salve the next time I came over.”

The Bartons are a southern family that had been willing to relocate north; Laura and Sharon are old friends, though Bucky’s always suspected Laura as being more of a mother figure to Sharon given their near 16 year age difference. The relief Laura’s closeness has brought Sharon is a palpable thing, and Bucky’s grateful for it.

“No problem, I can pick it up.”

Sharon grins as he stands up and grabs her coffee cup and his own to refill them. “Thanks.”

Leaning down, Bucky gives her a quick kiss on the mouth, tasting the edge of coffee and the grease from the butter on her toast. “Of course.”

 

\--

 

Bucky climbs into bed. It’s nearly three in the morning and he can tell from the warmth between the sheets that Sharon’s been in bed for a few hours already. Despite his best efforts, there’s no way his absences haven’t been noticed, but Sharon hasn’t said much of anything about them.

Time has eaten away the awkwardness between them, but there’s still so much unsaid, so many secrets. He knows, despite his best efforts, that he must smell of Steve. Bucky wants to be brave, to confess his sins against her, but can never find the strength.

It takes him a long while to realize the fear isn’t making the sins real, but rather the idea of losing Sharon to them. For a while, Bucky had lived with the idea that he’d taken the bonding to protect Sharon, to protect his pack and Steve, but he can’t pretend that’s it anymore. He likes living in this house with her, likes waking up to warm, happy body beside him, likes opening up the bond with her and feeling a reciprocal warmth flow over it.

He doesn’t want to lose that. It’s all he thinks about now with Steve, and the hurt and guilt are reaching a point where Bucky feels ripped in two.

Sharon shivers as he spoons up behind her, grousing light-heartedly when his cold skin presses up against her. She’s so warm that he shivers pleasurably in return, leeching the warmth off of her.

“How is he?” Sharon asks sleepily, letting out a quiet breath into her pillow. She’s not quite awake, but not fully asleep, and it’s the first time she’s ever mentioned where he disappears to some evenings.

Steve had been oddly frantic tonight, clingy in a way Bucky hadn't seen since the immediate aftermath of Peggy's death. Bucky had waited until Steve had fallen into a deep slumber before he had slid from Steve’s bed, shifted as soon as he step foot on the porch and run quickly into the forest.

He bathed in the river before he came home even though the November chill made it near frigid. He’d climbed into the fastest running part near the northern bend that turned to rapids, let the cold water run through his shaggy black fur, wondered idly of Steve's come was still inside him shifted like this.

“Okay,” Bucky answers quietly into the skin just below her ear. “Glad to be home, though.”

She doesn't stay wrapped in his arms long, flopping over onto her stomach to sleep, and it takes him a few minutes to realize how much he wants her to let him, how much he wants to come back to this house and feel safe instead of the weight of all the ghosts of the people he couldn't save.

Including Steve.

 

 

 

* * *

* * *

* * *

 

 

 

“Steve?” Bucky asks, shocked as Steve steps over the threshold and into the house. The house that used to be his. The house he hasn’t stepped into for nearly five years. The house that Sharon is in _right now_.

“ _Steve_ ,” he says again, urgently, because Sharon is in the kitchen. What they do in the forest is bad enough, but bringing it into Sharon’s home is a bridge too far for Bucky. It is the ultimate betrayal of her. He knows that he’s been transferring too much over the bond in the last few weeks as the guilt has grown, the hurt he feels reflected in her eyes, and he wishes he could be stronger, that he could find a way to love Steve and not hurt Sharon, to love Sharon and not lose Steve.

That he could be a better man.

Then he hears her footsteps behind him and his entire body locks up in abject terror.

Sharon is behind him, in her yoga pants and t-shirt, her hip resting against the side of the doorframe between the hallway and the kitchen. Steve’s eyes snap up immediately, staring at her. Bucky’s known Steve practically his entire life, and for one of the very first times, he is completely unable to read Steve. Sharon and Steve are closed to him, and it’s frightening.

Bucky looks between them as they converse silently.

“I’m going for a run,” Sharon says, peeling off her shirt and stepping into the kitchen, toward the back door. By the time the door snaps shut, Steve is looking at Bucky again. There’s a desperation in his gaze, like he needs to lock it on someone instead of the walls of the house that was once his home.

“She knows,” Steve tells him, his voice shaky. “I don’t know what I’m doing anymore.”

 

\--

 

She knows.

She told Steve to come.

She told him to come to their house.

 _Jesus fucking Christ_.

 

\--

 

It’s a strange, precarious balance. There are new rules, concessions to Sharon relayed by Steve that make Bucky cringe with how fucking _selfish_ they make him feel. With every passing day, Sharon starts to feel more like the wolf Steve had been before loss had changed him, the kind of wolf who loved with selfless purity.

Neither of them are deserving of it, but they take it nonetheless.

The first night, Steve sleeps on the couch even though Sharon makes up one of the guestrooms upstairs with fresh sheets. There’s nearly six rooms upstairs alone, so there’s plenty to choose from, but Bucky knows Steve hasn’t set foot on the second floor of the house since the night of Peggy’s wake.

No one sleeps in Steve & Peggy’s old room. Bucky isn’t even sure Sharon has step foot in it; the door is always closed. The one time Bucky wandered into it to grab a few shirts in the closet and left the door to the room open, he’d come back from his run that night to find it firmly shut again.

Halfway through the night, Bucky wakes as Sharon carefully extricates herself from his arms. He lets out a grumble of disapproval, but Sharon shushes him, flapping a hand at him as she walks out the door.

Bucky can hear her moving around the house thanks to the creaky floorboards, first along the hall of the second floor, then down the stairs. One of the closet doors opens and closes, a tap runs. Steve’s low voice, groggy.

Then the footsteps ascend the stairs again and Bucky can feel her, feel the edge of their bond open enough to know she feels calm, secure in a way he’s never felt from her before. There’s a warmth, too. An affection that does not feel like it is for him.

“Just threw a blanket over him,” she whispers as she climbs back into the bed.

In the morning, Steve is gone, the blanket folded carefully on the couch.

 

\--

 

Steve doesn’t come back the next night, but does the following night. Bucky stumbles downstairs around midnight to find a naked Steve, dirty from his shift, splayed out on the couch, asleep. Bucky drapes a blanket over his ass and legs, running a hand over the warm skin of his bare back, before heading back upstairs.

It’s another week before he returns again, but this time, he comes back four nights in a row.

Bucky can feel him in the house, the warmth of their connection. He can feel the beat of Steve’s heart from the floor above, hear the quiet sound of his lungs filling and emptying. Bucky sleeps better than he has in years.

After another week, Sharon starts leaving blankets and a clean pair of Bucky’s shorts and a t-shirt on the couch for him.

 

\--

 

Bucky’s called away to Atlanta for a few days, Sharon staying home to help facilitate the exchange of families between the north and south, but also to keep an eye on Steve, who has gotten so quiet that they’ve both expressed concerns to one another about his state of mind.

But Steve keeps sleeping at the house, keeps eating the food Sharon makes and leaves for him in the fridge, so Bucky tries not to hover, tries to let Steve adjust to this new balance without pressuring him.

When Bucky gets back from Atlanta, he can smell Steve all over the bed Bucky shares with Sharon. But he can only smell the wolf, not the man.

Sharon doesn’t offer any explanations and Bucky doesn’t ask any questions.

 

\--

 

Sharon turns the study that had once been Steve’s art room on the first floor into a bedroom eventually, filling it with one of the bedframes and mattresses from the second floor, and issuing Steve the order that the couch is no longer an option. Steve’s spending most of his nights at the house, even though he’s still gone before dawn.

It takes another three weeks for Sharon to run her hand through Bucky’s hair as he sits on the couch, press a kiss to cheek and say, “Just sleep down here tonight, okay?” Steve’s shifted, snoozing in front of the fireplace to warm his fur, but his head lifts up as he hears Sharon speak.

Steve’s quiet and gentle for the first time in nearly as long as Bucky can remember, though they don’t do much more than kiss and touch each other in bed, Steve jerking Bucky off until he’s gasping as he comes. Bucky tries to reach down and touch Steve, but he bats his hand away, shoving Bucky onto his back and letting his body flop down on top of him, Steve’s hard-on pressed into his hip as Bucky slips into sleep.

In the morning, Bucky wakes to Steve still curled around him in the bed.

 

\--

 

“Are we going to talk about this?” Sharon asks one night, her finger running over the bite mark on Bucky’s hip.

Bucky sucks in a deep, shaky breath.

Bucky nods, but says nothing. Sharon doesn’t look angry, but she doesn’t look pleased, either. She’s touched the mark before when they’ve fucked, put her hand over it when she’s sucked him off, so its discovery isn’t new. Bucky could feel her curiosity at the time, but they hadn’t talked about much of anything back in those days.

But things are changing, the balance between them shifting, and there’s little for Bucky to hide behind anymore.

A bite can mean many things, but Sharon’s not a stupid woman, and he’s been relatively sure she figured it out ages ago, but it was one of the countless secret sins they ignored.

But this is the greatest sin of them all. Bonds are sacred. There are laws that govern them, and the first of them is that a bond is entered into between two wolves, and two wolves only. Some wolves will only bond with one wolf in their lifetime, refusing to bond again after they lose a mate.

Two wolves at once is a sacrilege.

“You’re not going to say anything?” Sharon asks, and this time she does sound a bit angry. “You’ve bonded with him, haven’t you?”

Bucky nods, his voice failing him.

Sharon shakes her head and goes quiet, turning away from him. The bond between them is closed tight, a hostility echoing around it.

Finally, Bucky speaks. “It was a year and a half ago. It wasn’t planned, it was stupid and impulsive, and we didn’t tell anyone.” He can still remember the moment he had woken in bed, the bite coming during a particularly rough night of sex, and the weight of what they had done had hit him. There was never true regret; bite or not, Bucky’s always belonged to Steve in one way or another. “He did it with Peggy, and Fury nearly had him exiled. We didn’t know what he would do if he found out Steve had broken the rules a second time.”

 _Two_ regents breaking the most sacred of laws. And the implication of a lack of lineage for the pack. It was messy and stupid and infinitely selfish.

“Can you feel him? Like me?” She looks confused and a little hurt, and truthfully, Bucky had been a bit confused by it at first too, a little afraid of what it would feel like being bonded to two wolves.

“Yes, but it’s different,” Bucky tells her, because he has no way of explaining what the both of them in his head feels like.

 

\--

 

Howard dies eight months after their bonding.

Sharon travels down to Charleston to meet with the southern elders and sit at the reading of Howard’s will.

(“I can come,” Bucky says, nervous about Sharon travelling south alone so early into their marriage. The southern wolves are loyal to her, but there many factions of the packs closer to the west that are displeased with the south’s new alliance with the north. “Morita and Sam can handle pack business for a week or two.”

Sharon shakes her head. “No. Stay here.”

Bucky doesn’t need to step into her mind to know why she wants him to stay.)

Howard’s will had stipulated no funeral - an extremely unusual request for a regent and a strong break with tradition - so Bucky hadn’t officially needed to travel down with Sharon, though he find himself wishing he had gone with her the first night without her. The house is too quiet with her gone, even with Steve spending more and more time in it, and Bucky finds himself sleeping in their bed, rather than downstairs with Steve, while she’s gone.

Howard’s remains are quietly and privately put to rest in the Stark crypt next to Maria and Tony’s with a few witnesses, mostly distant family and close allies of the Starks.

Sharon is quiet in the weeks following her return, and Bucky is respectful, waiting for her to come to him, rather than trying to press anything on her. Growing up a ward of the Rogers clan, his family had all been inherited, much in the same way most of Sharon’s had, and Bucky remembers the ache Sarah and Joe’s death had left in his heart, even though they were not family by blood.

Eventually, she turns to him one night as he’s reading beside her in bed, her nose tucking under the cut of his jaw and scenting. Bucky’s sure he smells of Steve even though the both of them have done nothing more than kiss since Howard’s death, respectful of Sharon’s mourning. If he does smell of Steve, Sharon doesn’t seem to mind, pressing against him enough that he can slot a thigh between hers, snug it up against her cunt. She’s not very wet yet, but he can feel it seep against his skin a bit as he kisses her, rubs his body against her.

The bond is more closed that she’s ever kept it before, even as he slides her shirt off to get at her breasts, his mouth closing around one of her nipples and suckling at it gently. Sharon’s breasts are a bit sensitive, and Bucky’s always enjoyed playing with them, watching the violent pleasure he can pull out of her with a swipe of his tongue. He gives her the edge of his teeth on the left one and she lets out a shocked gasp, her fingers clenching and unclenching in his hair, desperate.

Bucky loves going down on her, something Sharon is particularly fond of too, but this time when he tries to slide down between her legs, she pulls him back up, shaking her head and locking her legs around his hips. His cock slips against her slit with her legs spread as open as they are, and she’s warm, wet, and ready.

“I want you inside me,” she tells him, and his body reacts instinctively, his hips snapping to press against her. It takes a little maneuvering for him to properly line himself up with her, and then he’s pressing inside her body. Her eyes always squeeze shut that first time he pushes in, like she can’t quite handle the feeling, and it makes pleasure shoot straight up his spine.

Her hands rest at the small of his back as he strokes into her, holding on, but also urging him on. “Harder,” she moans, but he’s already skirting the edge of rough with his thrusts, and if he continues this pace, she’ll have a nasty set of bruises on her hips come the morning.

“Just--” he starts to say when her nails dig into his skin with displeasure as he does not give in to her demand. He doesn’t want to hurt her, even though it seems like that’s what she’s aiming for here. “Just trust me,” he stutters out, leaning forward a bit and tugging up her legs to tighten the angle; he knows this way will intensify the feeling without running the risk of hurting her.

She nods, closing her eyes and letting out choked breath when he starts fucking her again.

It doesn’t take long for her to come, and when she starts to shake apart, the bond between them flies open, pleasure and sorrow in equal ferocity echoing in his head as he finishes inside of her, the wet sounds of their bodies sliding together obscene in the quiet room.

He holds for a few minutes as he goes soft inside of her, letting her hang on to his shoulders. When he finally rolls off of her, he reaches out and tugs her over, pressing her chest against his side.

“Are you okay?” Bucky asks. Sharon shakes her head, her eyes a bit glassy.

He prods a bit more, soft questions about her trip to put Howard to rest, until she finally lets out a deep, rough sigh.

“Howard wasn’t ready for a child, not after Tony,” Sharon tells him. “And not without a wife. It took me a long time to understand that. At first, he felt so cold, so distant; I’d come to this new world and I felt utterly alone. I missed Peggy, I missed my sisters, and I thought the uncle who had taken me _hated_ me. I was scared all the time.”

Bucky nods, running a hand through her hair.

“He was never cruel, but it never felt like he cared, either. I didn’t understand it. Mother never talked about Tony or Aunt Maria, and Jarvis only told me when I was a teenager.” She takes a deep breath and continues. “It got better, though. As I got older, he grew kinder. I understood him, and I understood the love he bore for me. It’s hard now because I can see all the things he did to keep me safe, to show me that he loved me when he couldn’t say it or show it in a way I could understand at the time. And I miss him.”

It had been the death of Tony and Maria that had sparked the great pack war of the 80s. The war divided the territories along new lines, decimated and rebuilt packs as they fell in the war between the east and the west. Though it had never been officially confirmed, it was taken as pack truth that Brock Rumlow’s father had ordered the deaths of the Starks.

(Rumlow had been Alexander Pierce’s illegitimate son, born to a mistress who hoped to elevate her position by bearing an alpha son, but learned the hard way how Pierce felt about ambitious women. He’d remained unclaimed until all three of Pierce’s legitimate sons were lost in the war, named heir as the last living son of Pierce, and then regent after Howard had ripped Pierce’s throat out.)

Howard’s luck - if you could call it that - had been dumb; instead of being at home, with his wife and child, he had been tucked away at the house of his mistress. It had been said he never bonded with another wolf after Maria had died - out of penance or guilt, Bucky isn’t sure.

The love Howard had for Sharon was strong, and Bucky had seen it that night in Fury’s chambers, watching a man plead for her safety in the only way he knew how. Howard, even in Sharon’s childhood, had never struck Bucky as a warm man, but there was no doubt he loved her.

“He tried his hardest, but sometimes the estate felt like a prison more than a home,” Sharon says. “I think he was worried about something happening again. I lived for visits from family or people we knew, people Howard trusted enough to let in.” She tilts her chin and looks straight into Bucky’s eyes. “I liked it best when Steve came to visit. Especially when he brought you.”

Bucky tries for a bit of levity; he hates having this much sorrow in his bed. “Oh yeah?” he asks, wiggling his eyebrows suggestively.

Sharon rolls her eyes and pinches Bucky lightly. “Stop it. I meant when I was young. I lost my sisters when I left to stay with Howard, and there were never any young wolves around. For a while, you were the only friends I had. Brothers, even.”

Sharon had only been six when Howard had brought her over from London. The first time Bucky met her - two years later - he’d been fourteen, brought along for a regent meeting with Steve and his parents, the family that had fostered him since he was a young pup himself. She’d been a quiet girl, but he and Steve had both liked her, fiery and stubborn when you got her angry enough. It makes Bucky beyond sad to hear exactly how lonely her childhood had been, despite the fact that Steve and Bucky had been suspicious of it at the time.

“Brothers?”

Sharon blushes. “Well yeah. At first.”

“At first?”

Sharon groans. “You can’t not have _noticed_ ,” she says, embarrassed enough that she’s fully blushing now. “God, the second time you and Steve stayed the entire summer.” That was the summer Steve had broken a covenant of the Council and snuck Peggy out of Howard’s estate in the middle of the night. “I had the most horrible crush on you.”

“You were fourteen!” He’d been nearly twenty at the time, completely unaware of anything that wasn’t a pretty - age appropriate - girl throwing her eyes his way.

This time, Sharon laughs. Bucky doesn’t realize how much he’s missed the sound. “Oh god, and every inch of it. I mooned over you the entire summer. I was _devastated_ when Howard caught you and Connie out in the back fields. I cried to Peggy for ages, she must have been so annoyed with me.”

Connie hadn’t been more than a summer fling, a girl looking for nothing more than a little fun with an alpha - like most of the girls Bucky ended up running with during his largely misspent youth. She’d been a beautiful beta from a well-positioned family in Howard’s pack, and last Bucky had heard of her, she’d married into a pack in northern France and had two sons.

Bucky can’t help the smug grin that spreads across his face.

“Don’t worry, I got over it real quick,” Sharon tells him, jutting out her jaw a bit. It’s an impressive performance, but the tone tells him that it’s just that. Though Bucky had always thought of Sharon as a beautiful wolf, he’d never thought of her as someone he’d want in his bed until he had walked to the shore and seen her in that white dress. “You earned yourself quite the reputation, Barnes.”

It had been easy losing himself to it when Steve had found Peggy; Bucky had always loved Steve, but it seemed silly to hang on to something he knew would never be. It had never felt cheap or tawdry; he’d enjoyed every moment with the wolves he’d laid with, relished the physical connection, the warmth of their bodies and affection. But it hadn’t been until Steve - and now Sharon - that he’d realized the depth of the connection he’d been missing all that time.

Bucky’s not sure what’s written on his face, but suddenly Sharon’s eyes go tender and kind. “It must have been hard,” Sharon says gently. “Losing Steve like that.”

Bucky shakes his head. “I was glad he found Peggy. She was a good woman with a good heart.” For some reason he still finds it difficult to speak to Sharon of his love for Steve; it still feels like a betrayal, even with her consent. Especially now that the familial love he had once had for Sharon has shifted to something decidedly more than that. “I had always loved him a little more than I should, but Peggy… she could give him the things I wouldn’t have ever been able to.”

“A lineage.” For regents, there is little more important than a lineage; it is why regent bonds require Council assent. Sharon tilts her head to look Bucky properly in the eyes. “The heart doesn’t work that way though, does it?”

Bucky reaches out and cups her jaw, opening up the bond wide and inviting her in. “No, it doesn’t.”

 

\--

 

Two months after Howard’s death, Sharon returns to the south after a few clans request a regency meeting. This time, Bucky comes with her, unwilling to be left behind again. Steve’s stable enough to be left on his own, practically moved into the house, but still quiet, and Bucky worries about some of the reports Sam has been giving him about activity in the west.

On the third night in Charleston, in Howard’s former home, Bucky’s worst fears come to fruition.

The door to the mansion slams open downstairs, and Bucky’s heart starts hammering in his chest when he hears the screams of the help. He takes the stairs four at a time down until he gets to the front hall and sees the the bloodsoaked figures standing there.

Steve’s got Sharon’s arm wrapped over his shoulder, her body tucked up against his chest as he holds her. They’re both naked, and Sharon is covered in blood. She’s breathing harshly, her eyes unfocused.

“Jesus!” Bucky shouts, too caught between anger and fear to bother wondering what the fuck Steve is doing in South Carolina. He quickly catalogues the wounds he can see: bad gaping wound on her dislocated left arm, bruising on her ribs, torn up hands, small head wound and split lip.

“Get the healer!” Bucky yells at Jarvis, who bolts for the phone in the parlor, and steps forward to touch Sharon.

“You can’t let her run out here alone!” Steve barks at Bucky angrily, and for a second, Bucky is taken aback at how livid Steve sounds, the accusation in his voice. “What the fuck were you thinking?”

Bucky shucks off his shirt and wraps around her body before taking Sharon from Steve’s arms. He can feel the pain radiating over the bond with both of them, and that’s when he notices the deep wounds in Steve’s back. Several sets of claw marks that are bleeding profusely.

“Are you okay?”

“Just get the healer.”

 

\--

 

“What the fuck happened?” Bucky asks Steve, watching Sharon sleep, his hand wrapped around hers. It had taken them the better part of fifteen minutes to convince her to let Cathy, the southern pack’s healer, give her the morphine; in the end, Steve had simply said, “Shut up and let her work,” without malice, and Bucky had been shocked when Sharon had grimaced, looked away from them toward the window, and nodded weakly.

Steve’s wounds have been stitched up and dressed as well, though he had refused the morphine Cathy had offered and shot Bucky a vicious look when he had tried to insist the way Steve had with Sharon. In the end, Steve had the six deepest wounds stitched with no painkillers.

Steve shakes his head, staring at the steady rise and fall of Sharon’s chest. “Can’t prove it, but those were Rumlow’s wolves.”

“What the fuck is he trying to do?”

Steve stares at him with the angriest look Bucky may have ever seen him wear. “Start a war.”


	3. iii. sharon

_“Your daughter!”_ Sharon’s father growls at her mother. “Bonded! To the Rogers boy!”

Out of all of her sisters, Peggy is the only that drives their father to this level of rage. Harrison Carter is not a kind man, nor a patient one, but Peggy’s joyful rebellion brings out the worst of him. It is times like this that make Sharon glad that she only sees him once or twice a year; he returns this time upon learning of Peggy’s bonding, and has spent the last few days in the south trying to manage the fallout with the Council.

Howard has taught her a bit about the politics of the packs of the Americas, but Sharon knows she’s missing something here. She’d known the night Peggy snuck into her room and told her she was leaving with Steve before sunrise that the fallout of their elopement wasn’t going to be good, but the tension inside her home is beyond what even she was expecting.

“Harrison,” her mother says in a soothing tone.

“Did it without the assent of the Council no less!”He slams his hand down on the kitchen table. “They’ve already pronounced it a legal bonding thanks to her sway with Fury. Meanwhile, I’ll have to renegotiate the western borderland with Rumlow now that she’s tied to that bloody mutt.”

“It was a love match, Harrison. And the northern pack is powerful. She’s positioned the family well despite the lack of blessing.You must see this.”Sharon’s always liked her mother best, a soft woman with a sharp mind who always brings her gifts and sweets from London when they visit, who hugs her too tightly and cries when Sharon’s father forces her to return home.

“You’ve always been too lenient with her. She’s too willful, not respectful enough. Never learned her bloody place.”

Sharon does not like the way that her father looks at her.

 

\--

 

Sharon is fifteen.

The first shift had come a few weeks after her twelfth birthday, unbidden. She’d been having a screaming fight with one of the men Howard had assigned to protect her - yet another wolf tasked with keeping her a prisoner - and it had come on like the cut of a hot blade, her body shifting and changing until skin had become fur, excruciating because she hadn’t known how to drift back into her mind while her body deconstructed itself.

The first year is hard. It takes months if not years for wolves to learn how to control their shifts, and though Sharon has always been a quick study at most things human, the learning curve has not followed in her wolf form. For alphas, it is twice as hard; emotions can trigger and worsen shifts, and alphas’ abilities to control their feelings come with long, hard practice.

Even now, three years later, she still struggles to hold back the wolf in times of anger, the shiver of fur crawling up her spine when her temper gets the better of her, the way her incisors sharpen until they slice at her tongue.

But god, Sharon loves to run. She loves the shift more than anything else in the world, a freedom she never feels when trapped in pale skin and blonde hair. Sharon’s strong and fast, too; though she hasn’t managed to control the wolf properly yet, she can outrun most of Howard’s inner pack. Even Steve and Bucky at times.

Like tonight. She waits at the top of the grassy hill flanked by the forest she’s just run through, sitting down on her haunches.

She likes the north. Nearly a year after their elopement, this is the first time she’s been allowed to visit Peggy since she bonded with Steve; Sharon is thrilled to find Peggy deliriously happy - far happier than Sharon has ever seen her before. Sharon likes the clans of the north, the land, the smell. She has a few close allies in the south - Laura and Kate, mostly - but Howard’s paranoia has meant that the regent family of the south is largely cut off from its clans.

The north is different. Everyone is friendly. Open. The land is beautiful and the regency is more ceremonial than authoritarian. It feels like family, like how Sharon imagined a pack would feel.

(Sharon doesn’t want to go home. She wants to stay with Peggy, sleeping in the room that smells like Bucky and eating breakfast with them every morning. She doesn’t want to go back to the south, to Howard’s fortress and his coldness.)

Peggy and Steve make it up the hill shortly after she does, playfully pushing into one another, Steve nipping at Peggy’s neck until she growls happily at him and takes off down the other side of the hill, Steve hot on her heels.

Bucky’s the last up the green slope. He surveys the deep valley that Steve and Peggy are running across; in the few weeks she’s spent with Steve and Peggy, she’s seen Bucky patrolling more often than not, and it’s oddly comforting to watch his routine. Bucky always has his eyes on things. It makes her feel safe somehow, something she’s not particularly used to.

 _You coming, kid?_ Bucky asks, licking his chops. It rankles her a bit; although Bucky never treats her like anything less than an equal, it’s clear he doesn’t see her the way she wishes he would see her, either.

Shifted like this, she still has trouble speaking; it requires a clarity of mind that she hasn’t quite mastered yet. Speaking as a wolf is different than speaking as a human - it isn’t a sound so much as a projection of thought. Wolves can howl, but to speak is to join minds.

(“Is that what it’s like to be bonded?” Sharon asked Peggy once.

Peggy smiled, touching the delicate scar of Steve’s bite on her neck. “Not even close.”)

 _Yeah, okay,_ she manages to get out, and she knows Bucky can hear her because his eyes grow wide and a lazy smile stretches across his face. He pads over and butts his head up against hers gently.

 _Come on_ , he tells her and breaks into a fast run, urging her to follow.

 

\--

 

Having Peggy in the north is the best gift Sharon has ever been given. For so long, Peggy had been holed away in London, making the transatlantic visits only when their father had business in America. In the three and a half years Peggy is bonded to Steve, Sharon visits so frequently that Peggy keeps one of the spare rooms specifically for her, filled with clothes and her things so Sharon barely need pack when she wants to come and visit. Sharon spends more time with Peggy in those years than in the preceding eight she spent in the south combined, and for short while, Sharon is finally happy.

And then, one night, Howard knocks quietly at her bedroom door, waking her out of a deep sleep. He doesn’t wait for her response before cracking the door open and stepping inside, sitting on the edge of Sharon’s bed near her hip.

His face is broken, the planes of his cheeks are sharp with the shadows that the light from the hall creates. His eyes are rimmed red and his breath is a bit sour with the smell of alcohol. He almost never drinks, so whatever this is, it is not good.

“Sharon,” he says gently, reaching out to touch her arm. “It’s Peggy.”

 

\--

 

Worse is four years later when Howard sits her down, his breath and tone entire sober as he says, “Your father has been making plans.”

 

\--

Bucky’s true to his word: he waits.

She’d been willing to sleep with him that first night, but she hadn’t really _wanted_ to, not after walking back into that house, feeling the weight of all the memories she’d thought she’d carefully locked away. It had been a relief when Bucky had offered to just sleep instead, enough that a flood of quiet attraction had flown through her. It had been why she hadn’t been opposed to Howard’s suggestion of Bucky even though his reputation as a lady’s man was well earned before he took over regency of the east. Beneath it all, Bucky is good man.

They share a bed for the first week they’re bonded even though they don’t have sex. Thankfully, they don’t really talk about it, but Bucky’s intentions are easy to parse: it is up to Sharon to initiate things. It’s a scary amount of power to have.

Though Bucky is kind and patient, she can feel his growing unease as the days tick past. He’s careful about touching her, about giving her space, and the longer she puts off taking him to bed, the more space he gives her. She gets little snippets from his mind when he’s not carefully guarding himself, the doubt and the worry over her. The guilt.

She doesn’t quite know why she waits. It isn’t a lack of attraction. Bucky is still one of the most handsome men she’s laid eyes on. The painful crush of her youth never really died, despite the lengths she went to kill it, and coming to find that the kind boy she remembers from her youth is still the same good man years later makes everything more complicated than she anticipated.

It’s not Steve, either. She’s almost positive Howard had no idea about the two of them, but Fury had quietly mentioned his suspicions to her before he’d sent out the declaration, a last chance to reconsider. But Sharon had already been harbouring her own suspicions, a lingering smell of Steve - the same kind of smell Peggy used to wear - the last time she’d run into Bucky nearly two years previous in DC keeping her awash in questions.

(It’s not that she doesn’t care, only that her life has taught her the importance of concession. She cares for Steve, if not only as a friend - family, even - but also as someone Peggy would never want to see suffer. She’s trapped, and she knows in some ways, so are they all.)

Bucky falls asleep quickly beside her tonight, exhausted from a day with Sam and Helen helping sort out a ridiculous dispute between a few families from the northernmost clan in Maine. She can tell Bucky hates mediating these kinds of squabbles, how much it takes out of him, so she leaves him be when he comes home and slips into bed beside her, curling up into her hip as she reads one of the books she found in his bookcase. It’s a good story, engrossing, and she doesn’t even realize she’s got her right hand in his hair, curling the thick strands between her fingers and lightly scraping her fingertips cross his scalp until he lets out a quiet moan, twisting closer to her in his sleep.

His profile is beautiful in the light from the lamp beside her, and she feels herself starting to get wet, her body responding to his closeness. The bond is calm in Bucky’s sleep, but there’s warmth over it, too.

She wants him, but she doesn’t know why she can’t bring herself to take that first step, why she can’t take what she know is being offered. Part of her wishes Bucky would initiate something, that he’d push, but she knows he won’t.

She has the power here.

The paperback makes a gentle noise as she tosses it on the night table, reaching over after to turn off the dim lamp and let darkness flood the room. She can still see him though; since her first shift, she’s always been able to see with near perfection in the dark, the shadows as familiar as the light. She slips down under the sheets, turning until she’s facing the sleeping form of a man she’s known for years and yet knows not at all.

She touches the skin of his cheek with a feather-light weight, careful not to wake him. Over the bony bridge his nose, along the familiar ridge of his strong jaw. When her fingers fall to his mouth, touching carefully, she can feel the calm rhythm of his breath against her fingertips.

His eyes crack open. “Sharon?” he asks, his voice rough with sleep.

Sharon leans in and kisses Bucky gently. His response is quiet and measured, like he’s trying not to spook her, but the bond is open now and the calm of his sleep has been replaced with the feeling of running, a heart pounding in the darkness of something unknown.

“It’s okay,” Sharon says calmly, trying to not project her own nervousness onto him. Knowing Bucky, it would only breed more guilt, and this… what they’re about to do, it isn’t about obligation. 

( _This_ is why she took the time, took the days to reach into him over the bond, to make sure it wasn’t about duty for him either, to feel the inkling of desire inside of him, too. She’d never - _never_ \- want his touch out of obligation.)

She reaches down and slowly pulls the loose shirt over her head. Even in the dark, she can see the way Bucky’s pupils grow fat. He doesn’t make a move to touch her though, just stares like she’s just slapped him right in the face.

“Um,” Sharon says nervously, his lack of response making her feel self-conscious. “Bucky?”

Like a switch has been flipped inside him, Bucky quickly reaches over and tugs her by the hip until her body is pressed up against his. He’d gone to bed shirtless, dressed only in a pair of pajama pants, and Sharon’s breasts press right up against all that bare skin, the rub of her nipples against his chest making her gasp into his mouth when he kisses her again, this time more aggressively.

“You sure?” Bucky asks after he rolls them over, perching over Sharon’s prone body.

Sharon nods. “Yeah.” She reaches up and wraps her hands around the sides of his chest and marvels at the feel. Muscled and thick, Bucky’s body is beautiful and shockingly strong. “You sure?”

He leans down a kisses her gently. Pulling back, he says, “Yeah,” with an amused smile, like she’s just asked him an exceptionally silly question. It’s nice to see him smile, nice to see the lines of tension on his face finally recede. She’s still glad she waited, but she regrets the toll it’s clearly taken on him.

They neck for a bit, kissing until Sharon’s mouth goes swollen and numb, until even she can smell how wet she is for him. Though it embarasses her to think about, Bucky’s exactly the way she imagined him as a girl, his mouth just as good as she had daydreamed about when she’d been far too young and invisible for him to see as more than a packmate.

Eventually he slips his hand between her legs, rubbing carefully at her overtop of her panties. He’s got her worked up enough that they are practically ruined, stickily slipsliding over her in a way that feels weird. So she tugs at them until he gets the hint, sitting back and tucking his fingers into the sides of the waistband, dragging them down her legs.

“Shit,” she hisses loudly when he drops his mouth against her pussy on the way back up her body, his tongue sliding against her folds with the perfect amount of pressure. He licks lazily at her clit, his hands coming up to spread her open a bit. It’s obvious in short measure that he likes it when she’s loud, encouraging Sharon to moan and whimper by giving her exactly what she wants when she does, sucking her clit into his mouth and humming until she is near frantic over how _good_ it feels.

If she lets him, she can come like this; the pressure is building up slowly but surely inside her, and he’s _very_ good at this, attentive to her body. But she reaches down and yanks him up before the sparks of her orgasm begin to hit her, just the fuzzy echo of warmth and pleasure remaining once he’s gone. She can sometimes come twice during sex, but it’s not always a sure thing with her, and she wants him inside of her the first time.

His mouth is shiny with her slick, his pupils blown with pleasure. He slides his forearm over his mouth, but it’s mostly a formality because when he kisses her, she tastes and smells nothing but herself. It’s far from unpleasant, though, a reminder of how it felt to have his mouth on her, that he wanted to taste her.

“What?” he asks her, his voice not overly questioning or annoyed, but she can tell he doesn’t understand why she’s stopped him. So she kisses him again, uses his distraction to shimmy his loose pajama pants down his legs.

This isn’t the first time Sharon’s had sex, but it’s the first time she’s had a wolf like Bucky between her thighs. The first time she’s felt a bare cock against the inside of her thigh instead of the cool slide of the latex of a condom.

(In a way it’s frightening, remembering what this is all about. About the role she’s supposed to fill.)

He’s fully hard, the head of his cock smearing against her thigh as he ruts against her.

“You still sure?” Bucky asks again, holding himself above her on his elbows so he can meet her eyes.

“Mmhm,” Sharon mutters, beyond words, her eyes slamming shut as Bucky presses into her. The stretch is perfect, the pressure just on the right side of pleasurable without being painful, though he goes slow, which she’s incredibly thankful for. It’s been a while since she’s laid with a man, and no matter how gentle he is with her, she’ll be sore in the morning.

They’re both keyed up enough that this won’t last long, so Sharon closes her eyes, focuses on the pressure, on the weight of his body, the smooth stretch of his skin against her and the wet slide of his body pushing into her. It’s such a weird, intimate, _incredible_ feeling, and with the bond, it’s only magnified. She can feel his own pleasure echoed back into her and it’s a feedback loop that makes her entire body seize up, her eyes rolling back into her head as she easily has the most intense orgasm of her life. 

She’d heard rumours of it being different with bondmates - longer and more intense, particularly if you peak together - but nothing really prepares her for the difference she feels with Bucky. It’s _amazing_.

As she starts to come down, her hands begin to wander, holding on as Bucky goes a bit feral with his thrusts, shifting her body to find an angle that doesn’t hurt against her overstimulated flesh. As she grips his hip, she feels the familiar shape of a bite mark under her fingers. 

Bucky lets out a strangled gasp and comes jerkily as she presses her fingers into it, confused.

 

\--

 

She gets a good look at it the next day, watching Bucky as he steps out of the shower while she brushes her teeth. She tries to be sneaky about it, pretending to reach over to right one of the tubes of her body cream as he grabs for the towel hanging off the hook to her left.

The teeth marks in his hip aren’t new, the scar tissue older and a faint silver instead of the angry pink of the mark at his throat. Most wolves have scars - bites, scratches, the wounds natural to their lives - but she knows the shape of this mark. She’s seen this bite before, the pattern bitten into Peggy’s skin.

It’s a bond bite. It’s Steve’s bond bite.

They were bonded, and Bucky bonded her, too. Steve let him bond her.

And Sharon can’t even begin to explain how she feels about that.

 

\--

 

(It’s wrong. It’s incredibly wrong. Bonds are sacred, a covenant meant to be shared between two wolves and two wolves alone. They can only be broken in death, and even then, few wolves ever bond again.

It’s not done. Though Sharon has heard whispers of wolves who have bonded more than one, they are always the ones that choose to live outside of the packs, an uneasy, miserable existence. These wolves choose to bond to solidify power amongst the powerless, the furtherst possible distance from a bond of love that there is.

But Sharon can’t pretend that what she has with Bucky started with that either. Despite the affection she has for him and the reciprocal feeling that shifts over the bond when they’re together, she’s under no illusions that Bucky bonded her to protect her, not because he was in love with her.

And Steve let him. To protect her? To protect his pack with a lineage? To protect Bucky?

She wishes she knew.

And she wishes she could muster the anger that she know she should feel about being left in the dark, being bonded into something so contrary and abhorrent to the rules she has been told are absolutes, but she can’t. 

All she feels is tired. Whatever this is, whatever she has wandered into unknowingly, it is better than the fate that lay on the other side of her father’s schemes.)

 

\--

 

She wonders if Steve thinks he’s being clever, if he thinks she can’t feel him during his runs, can’t see the sliver of white watching from trees. It’s been nearly six weeks since the bonding, and while Steve has all but disappeared, she’s begun catching glimpses of him on her runs at night.

Shifted, he’s white, like her, but has long black markings that stretch over his eyes and along the side of his face. At the right angle, they almost look like wings along the sharp planes of his cheeks. When she was young, she’d thought they’d looked like flattened angel wings, something that made Peggy laugh when Sharon had admitted it to her.

He never gets close enough that she can get a good look at him; as wolves, they all have their strengths, and Sharon’s have always been her speed and her sight in the dark. She’s almost positive that he has no idea that she can see him at night, the only reason he comes back night after night. 

After a while, she starts to find a little comfort in it.

It takes Sharon another few weeks to steel up the nerve she requires to do what she needs to do. She is not blind; she sees the precipice that the division between Bucky and Steve has left them all dangling over, and while she wants to believe that it is the unselfish part of her that makes this choice, it isn’t. She is tired of feeling Bucky’s guilt and desperation; whatever it is that is broken, Sharon alone cannot fix it.

Walking up behind him at the kitchen table, she rests her hand at the nape of Bucky’s neck. It’s warm, the flesh yielding under her hand. Touching him, she can feel him in the back of her head more clearly.

He turns and looks up at her, a warm, sleepy smile spreading across his face as he reaches back to cover her hand with his own.

“He’ll be up on the western ridge tonight,” she says, and the smile quickly disappears.

“What?”

“Steve,” she says, and the hurt hits her like a wave of humid air from a scorching summer night. “I’ve been running out west, and I keep seeing him near that spot in the river where it forks north.”

He’s silent for a moment, staring up at her with wide eyes, like she’s trying to trap him into a corner.

“Sharon…”

Her name is loaded, like he’s asking her a question that she doesn’t really know if she can answer. It had seemed so much easier in theory, giving this to him. It’s the second that she realizes that she could lose him. 

It’s the second she realizes that it _matters_ to her if she loses him.

 

\--

 

The guilt. The guilt is the worst part.

The fear of losing Bucky dissipates soon after the first night he comes home smelling of Steve. The smell is there every night he goes out running, but it’s faint, which lets her know he’s trying to mask it. But they both know the truth about what he does out there, so it feels less like a lie and more like some strange consideration.

(In the darkest parts of her mind, she wonders if Steve can smell her on Bucky when he goes to him, if Steve smells like her too by the time they are done.)

He always comes home; some nights later than others, but he always returns to her. She always wakes in the morning with Bucky’s warmth wrapped around her, the gentle rhythm of his breathing against her back.

That, now, is the best time of her day. Before Bucky wakes, before she can feel the world settle on his shoulders. The frustration and the guilt and the worry he feels about everything he can’t fix. It’s overwhelming.

She was right: she alone cannot fix what is broken. But what has becoming glaringly apparent in the weeks since they started this strange arrangement is that Steve cannot fix it, either. With each passing day, she can feel Bucky’s heart breaking a little more, the hurt grow a little bit deeper.

 

\--

 

“Sharon,” Bucky moans, one of his arms locking behind her lower back to tip her hips up at an angle that makes his thrusts hit at a place that has her thighs shaking with how good it feels.

She’d been surprised when Bucky had woken her with his head between her thighs, wringing an orgasm out of her before sliding over top of her and slipping inside her body. She hadn’t been expecting him back from Virginia until tomorrow; the plan had been for him to spend the night and drive home the next day, but he must have gotten into the car the second the elder meeting had been over given he’s in their bed now, his sweaty skin pressed against hers.

“Missed you,” he whispers into her throat, his voice low enough that she’d have thought she was hearing things if she hadn’t felt the movement of his mouth against her.

She comes shortly before he does, sinking her nails into his ribs and holding on as she feels him spill inside of her, the wet, messy, warm spread inside her cunt. They’ve been quietly trying for the past two months, more of an unspoken decision between them; she’s no longer on her birth control and he never reaches for a condom from the stash that has been in the nightstand since she moved in.

But he’d know from the smell of her tonight that his seed won’t take, that it won’t for another two weeks at least.

Three hours later, right before dawn, she wakes up to him rolling her over onto her stomach, pressing inside of her as he links his fingers through hers.

 _Missed you_ , she hears echo over the bond.

 

\--

 

The crib is hidden in the basement of the house, in a room with no windows. She finds it taking down the last box of Bucky’s stuff, mostly books and a few pairs of boots he hadn’t wanted to throw away.

It hasn’t been disassembled and there’s a dusty pink blanket still inside, a few small toys with knitted eyes that stare up at her. There’s a chunk of wood missing from one of the legs, a smear of blue paint in the wound that she recognizes from the frame of the door, like someone was careless trying to bring it into the room.

Trying to force it through the door.

Three hours later, Sharon walks up to the door of Steve’s cabin in the woods and knocks.

 

\--

 

She’s laying the blanket over Steve’s body when his eyes slide open. She’d made up the guest room, but somehow knew he wouldn’t take it. Wolves run a little hot, but the main floor of the house is frigid in the winter, no matter how high Sharon sets the thermostat or how long she lets the fireplace burn at night. She’d come down to find him shivering, curled up a bit on himself on the too-small couch, and had gone for a blanket.

Now, he’s staring up at her as she grips the edge of the blanket, her fingers resting over the skin of his bicep as she stands frozen.

“Why?” he asks her, his voice groggy. And maybe a bit scared. She wishes she had an answer she could give him. She has one, but she’s not ready to admit it, not even to herself.

“Because you deserve it,” is what she settles on, and when she says it, the grateful, sad look on Steve’s face makes her twist her own around. It’s too much.

“Sharon.” God, the sound of his voice slices through her. She can’t bring herself to look at him again, even as she feels warm fingers slide over her own.

She lets Steve touch her hand gently before she pulls away, climbing back up the stairs to her husband.

 

\--

 

Her father shows up to the resting of Howard’s remains. There are only a few members of the Council present, as well as Jarvis and a handful of Howard’s confidants.

“Sharon.” Her name sounds sour coming out of her father’s mouth.

It’s the first time Sharon has seen him since Peggy’s funeral. She can still remember the horrible words her father spit at Steve, the accusations of theft, as if Peggy were a possession of his that had been stolen. The bitter tone when he had when he blamed Steve for her death, for not protecting her. For letting her die.

(Steve hadn’t cried that day, but in that room, sitting across from him, the sorrow had radiated off of him like a blistering hot stove. She could taste it in every breath, a match for her own. His eyes were filled with a pain that had passed beyond tears into something unfathomable.)

Harrison Carter is only her father in name. The man whose bones are being laid to rest today is the only father she’s ever really known, emotionally absent or not.

“You weren’t invited,” Sharon says roughly. Howard hated her father, and his appearance at the private ceremony is an affront to Howard’s memory and he knows it.

That gets his attention. Sharon isn’t dumb; she knows that the stance she is taking is playing with fire. There’s a reason why the Carter clan is so powerful. But her mother is dead, her uncle is dead, and she is the last of the Stark blood in America. And today, she’ll be a Stark, not a Carter.

“You think you can use that tone with me?” he says.

Sharon remembers Howard. She remembers Peggy, her rebellious streak that Sharon had always admired. The part that was never afraid of their father, of taking the path that was hard. She remembers that her father had been trying to sell her, just like he had been trying to sell Peggy. She remembers that she is a sister to Peggy and a daughter to Howard, and neither would back down to the pathetic excuse of a man in front of her now. The man who had intimidated and bullied her through her entire life, happy to trade her off to whatever deal suited him best. She had only been lucky enough to be given to Howard first.

“Yes, I think I can. I think I can talk to you however I please on _my_ lands.”

Her father’s eyes grow wide. “You insolent _bitch_ ,” he says, and the word deeply shock Sharon. Despite years of watching her father’s anger, he’s never spoken to her like that before, never called her or her sisters names. She finally understands the fury she’s dealing with. “After everything. Letting Howard go behind my back to bond you to that fucking mongrel, trying to whelp alphas for that pathetic excuse of a pack. Not even a Rogers, but his fucking half-breed replacement.” 

Anger explodes through Sharon, her eyes blazing bright as she steps toward him.

“Get out,” Sharon spits.

Behind her, the southern wolves growl.

 

\--

 

Bucky’s in Atlanta. 

Sharon’s perfectly aware of what it will look like; the other regents will bring their bonded mates to the Council gathering, and given Sharon is not only a mate, but a regent in her own right, to say her absence will be conspicuous is an understatement. Howard’s death is fresh enough that she can beg off her absence as a mourning period, but Sharon knows she should be there mostly _because_ of Howard’s death. There must be a regent in the south, and the other packs need to know it.

But neither she nor Bucky wanted to leave Steve in the north alone.

Steve disappears shortly after Bucky leaves for Atlanta, and Sharon tries to not take it personally. He’s still quiet with her, cautious like she’s about to pull the rug out from underneath him. But he’s kinder - warmer - and more reminiscent of the man she knew in her youth than the shell of what remained after Peggy died. 

Sharon’s turning of the light in the kitchen when she hears the scratching of claws on wood at the back door. When she opens it, she finds Steve on the other side, shifted.

“Come on,” she says, opening the door wider for him and letting him wander inside.

He follows her around the house as she closes everything up, flipping off lights and turning off the television in the living room. He doesn’t follow her upstairs at first, his nails making light tapping noises on the wood floors downstairs, but when she finishes brushing her teeth, spitting out a fresh mouthful of water, she spots him sitting in the doorframe of the bathroom, watching her.

It’s the first time she’s seen him upstairs since the evening of Peggy’s funeral.

“You coming?” Sharon asks, slipping past him down the hall. She can hear him following her, the soft pads of his feet and the sharp tick of nails.

She doesn’t look at him as she climbs into the bed, afraid she’ll scare him off, and instead turns on the lamp and reaches for her book.

She hears him flop to the floor like a heavy lump, just the steady sound of his breathing interrupted occasionally by a heavy sigh or light whine.

After a half-hour of reading, she hears Steve shuffle around on the floor. When she tosses the book onto the nightstand, finally ready to sleep, Steve jumps on the bed, circling once before dropping down near the end on Bucky’s side. He tucks his tail up along his body, but his rump is pressing against the bone of her ankle, a pressure she finds oddly comforting as she leans over and switches her light off.

Halfway through the night, Sharon wakes, overly warm. When her eyes blink open, Steve is stretched out beside her on the bed, his body long and vulnerable and pressed right up against her. His paws are twitching like he’s stuck in a dream; Sharon has always loved dreaming as a wolf, the dreams more lucid and pure than the ones she has in her human skin.

She brushes her hand over the soft fur over his shoulder blades, careful not to wake him. He presses back into her hand unconsciously, his body settling as he drops out out of the dream. 

In the morning when she wakes, Steve is gone, but he’s back the next night, this time already lying on top of the bed by the time she finishes up in the bathroom. He lets her get settled under the sheets and blankets before he moves, stretching out on his stomach with his head on his paws, watching her read.

It takes her ten minutes to realize she’s been reading the same few sentences over and over again, more interested in trying to watch Steve watch her without being too obvious about it.

The next night is the same, only he moves even closer to her as she settles, this time without her book. She reaches out slowly, giving him enough time to move away; when he doesn’t, she lets her hand drop gently into his fur, carefully running her fingers through it.

Steve’s eyes slide shut as he pushes into her hand.

 

\--

 

She doesn’t smell the wolves until it’s too late.

They’re all betas and omegas, which means she has a strength advantage, but there’s power in numbers, too. There’s at least five of them, but one runs off when she makes it clear exactly how much an alpha she is, ripping the throat out of another when he opens himself up to attack. But the others keep up the battle, chasing her as she tries to draw them back to the mansion.

The last one - a solidly built beta who is bigger than she is - gets the drop on her as she finishes off his remaining accomplice, his jaws wrapping around her front left leg and yanking hard enough that she can feel the muscle rip right along with the skin. Sharon lets out a horrible howl, the pain excruciating.

He’s locked his jaw onto her limb, the joint clearly dislocated, and he’s using his weight to drag her, jerking her along the ground in a sharp way that makes her whine in agony. She’s losing blood out of the wounds the others have inflicted, and she knows unless she manages to break his hold, he’s going to kill her if the blood loss doesn’t get to her first.

But his grip is too tight and her injuries are too great, and her strength is failing her.

Suddenly, a white streak darts out of the forest and the loud thud of the wolves slamming together sends a shockwave rattling around in her chest as she collapses onto the ground, finally loose from the beta’s jaws. She can hear the wolf’s screams and the crunching of bone as her vision swims in and out of blackness, then finally disappears entirely as her eyes shut.

She doesn’t know how, but she can feel him. She can feel him in the back of her head like she feels Bucky, and it’s terror. Pure terror.

_Steve?_

There’s human hands on her now, fingers threading through her fur, matted with blood, but she can’t find the strength to open her eyes. She’s so tired, and the black is too inviting.

_Come on, Sharon. Open your eyes. Come on, sweetheart, come on. Sharon?_

 

* * *

* * *

* * *

 

They keep Sharon doped up for most of the next few days. The memories are hazy at best, even the trip back to New York. Normally, they’d wait for her to heal up before moving, but they’re all safer up north, even though the small snippets of conversation she catches let her know that her pack is livid over the attack, all the clans of the south aligned entirely behind the regency for the first time in nearly twenty-five years.

Although no one can prove it, everyone knows this was retaliation by the west. What haunts Sharon the most is that she doesn’t know if her father was a part of it, too. She feels lonely and scared for the first time since Howard’s death. Peggy is gone, her mother is dead, she hasn’t talked to her other sisters in years, and her father is likely aligned with the man who just tried to have her killed.

The only comforts are Bucky and Steve. Steve in particular, who stays silently glued to her bedside while Bucky makes plans to return back to their home. Cathy makes a lot of noise about giving Sharon space to rest, but is shot down entirely by Steve. She doesn’t remember a lot, but she remembers waking to him shifted, sleeping beside her on the bed. She remembers seeing Steve every time she woke, either fur or skin.

Cathy gives her a massive dose of morphine before they put her in the car to head home, settled lengthwise in the backseat against Bucky, who wraps his arms around her to keep her steady, her body braced between his legs as he sits back against the passenger-side door. Steve’s up front, driving _their damn car_ , which she doesn’t bother asking about, even though she and Bucky flew down to Charleston.

She’s sure Bucky and Steve have had a conversation over Steve’s surprise appearance in the south, though she wasn’t privy to it. In the end, she doesn’t care. She’s only grateful, whatever the reason.

They’re barely on the I-95 before she passes out entirely, her body warmed by Bucky’s behind her, the first time she’s felt comfortable in days, even with the uneasy rocking of the car.

She floats in and out as they drive, unsure if what she’s hearing is real or a dream.

_I could feel her. Buck, I don’t--_

_What do you mean you could feel her?_

_Like you._

 

\--

 

Sharon heals slowly. Of all the alpha gifts she has been given, healing has not been one of her strongest, and by the time some of the bruising on her face has gone down, nearly all of Steve’s wounds have closed up and nearly healed over.

There’d been so much blood at the time that she hadn’t been sure, and confirming it would have required both going to the hospital and telling Bucky. And Steve. But deep down, even as Cathy had been stitching her shut, she had known it. It’s why she’d let Cathy give her that much pain medication after only a moment’s hesitation, hadn’t bothered to worry about the antibiotics she was being given.

But when she gets her period a little over four weeks later, she knows for sure she’s lost it.

 

\--

 

“Where are you going?” Steve asks as Sharon opens the back door.

“For a walk,” Sharon says sourly. She knows she’s been prickly over the past few weeks, but it feels like something entirely out of her control. It’s only aggravated by the fact that Steve and Bucky are so willing to accept her rottenness with disgusting patience and kindness.

Steve in particular, who has taken to sleeping on their bed, shifted, tucked between her legs and Bucky’s. Who follows her around with just enough space that he thinks he’s being sneaky in how he’s watching over her. She wants to find comfort in it, but everything - even the kindest gestures from Bucky and Steve - make her feel suffocated and twitchy.

So when Steve takes a step toward her as she stands by the back door, she snaps. “I don’t need a fucking guard, Steve.”

Steve smiles weakly. “Yes, you do,” he tells her calmly, even though he’s clearly trying to avoid being overbearing or dismissive, which only makes her even angrier. “But that’s not why I wanted to come. I just wanted to join you.”

And though Sharon knows she’s being played, that he’s certainly not craving her particularly shitty company as of late, she can’t help but feel like a complete asshole. She shakes her head. “Yeah, you can come, Steve. I’m sorry, I’m just…”

Steve’s eyebrows draw together. “Sharon.” God, the patience in his voice sets her on edge. “It’s okay.”

But nothing feels okay as they walk through the hilly backlands to the forest, heading for the western ridge. For nearly a year, Sharon has felt like she has been chasing Steve’s ghost, trying to patch up whatever rift she had opened, trying to build something between them. In the weeks since Charleston, it’s inverted so dramatically that Sharon feels unmoored. She can’t turn around without seeing the shadow of Steve, and he’s said more to her in three weeks than the previous three months combined. It’s mostly _hellos_ and _goodbyes,_ banal questions over meals, the sort of pleasantries you typically share with someone who lives with you, but given their absence during much of their time together, they mean far more. 

(And Steve is truly living with them now; he no longer disappears during the day, and spends his nights with them too, though he’ll only venture upstairs shifted.)

Normally, they would shift to run the forest, but Steve doesn’t even make mention of it as they walk the dirt path that follows the river. Sharon hasn’t shifted since Charleston; Helen had warned her after a quick check-up that it would be better to wait until the stitches had healed properly, but it’s been nearly two months, and the last of the stitches came out ages ago.

This land has been in the Rogers lineage for more than three hundred years, and thanks to his parents, and their parents before them, it’s largely untouched, only dotted with a few family homes. Hundreds of privately owned acres to the east of Catskill Park, and Sharon loves every last inch of it, even during times like this.

After about an hour of walking, Sharon feels Steve’s hand slip around her wrist, bringing her to stop.

“You were pregnant,” Steve says, and Sharon looks up, her entire body rigid with surprise and fear. The look on Steve’s face at her tacit confirmation is so devastating that Sharon flinches away, everything too raw.

“How--” Sharon only manages to choke out one word before her throat closes up. She turns and locks eyes again with him.

Steve’s face crumbles a bit. “Peggy smelled different after she got pregnant,” he says, and this confirmation makes Sharon hurt all over again, remembering that little pink blanket in the crib in the basement. Peggy hadn’t even told her about it, which wasn’t a surprise given how long Peggy and Steve had been trying, how difficult it had been. “It’s--” He takes a deep breath and tries to steady his voice. “It’s really, really faint in the first months. But I remember that smell.” He swallows roughly. “Bucky wouldn’t know it.”

Sharon shakes her head. “You can’t tell him. You can’t tell him, Steve.”

It’s a horrible thing to ask of Steve, to keep this secret, but there’s no point in telling Bucky; she’d only been six weeks along - maybe - and had only known for a week herself. Sharon keeps trying to tell herself that it wasn’t real, that it had been a mistake, just a hiccup in her period, but if Steve could smell it…

“He’d want to know,” Steve tells her. “He want to know, and he wouldn’t want you to have to deal with this alone.”

Sharon feels the urge to cry welling up inside of her. It’s more than the attack, more than the loss of something she wasn’t even sure she wanted until it was gone, more than the last year, living this strange half-life, the potential of happiness weighed down by the past.

She’s exhausted.

“I don’t want him to know,” she says, summoning the strength to push down her anger and upset. It’s a hurt she wants to spare Bucky, but she’s also not sure what Bucky would do with the knowledge, and the territories are nearing a de facto state of war.

She looks straight at Steve. “And I’m not alone.”

Steve’s fingers tighten gently around her wrist.

“Okay,” he says.

 

\--

 

Steve jumps up on the bed that night, finding his place snuggled in the gap between their bodies, his back pressed carefully against Sharon’s leg and his paws brushing Bucky’s. In some ways, Sharon is selfishly grateful for his presence; though Bucky would never press the issue if she turned him down, and he’s made no overtures as she’s been healing, Sharon is not ready to sleep with Bucky again, nor broach the subject with him.

Sharon wonders briefly if this is why Steve’s slept between them every night since they’ve returned. In the end, it doesn’t really matter; both she and Bucky feel better with him close, whatever the reason.

Sharon reaches down, running her hand over Steve’s head and scritching behind his ear. When she looks up, Bucky is watching her quietly, an unreadable look on his face.

Steve keeps his promise: he doesn’t mention the miscarriage to Bucky.

 

\--

 

“Want to run?” Bucky asks, shucking off his shirt and tossing it over the back of one of the kitchen table chairs. Steve is already shirtless by the back door. It’s the second night of the full moon, and while the moon doesn’t control their shifts, the urge to run is always greatest during the three nights of the full moon. “Sam and Helen are running the ridge tonight with a bunch of the pack.”

Sharon feels a spike of fear streak through her. 

“No,” she says with a shake of her head, reaching for the kettle. She hates the lemon tea that Bucky drinks, but they’re out of her peppermint tea, and she hasn’t wanted to go into town to shop. She hasn’t wanted to leave the house at all. “Not up for it tonight.”

They try to be subtle about the way they look at one another, but she feels every twitch and every raised eyebrow. Out of the corner of her eye, she can see Steve motion to the door, urging Bucky to go, and Bucky’s soft shake of his head. The quiet argument between them that Steve eventually wins when Bucky says, “Okay. I won’t be long.”

Steve reaches for Bucky’s shirt and pulls it over his head, taking a seat in the chair. 

“Would you make me a cup?” he asks.

 

\--

 

“Sharon?” Steve says with a light shake to her shoulder. The horrible crick in her neck lets her know that she’s fallen asleep in front of the tv again, which on their wretched couch is never a brilliant idea. He bends at the knees until he’s face to face with her. “Bed?”

Sharon cracks her neck and sits up, making pitiful whining noises as her sore muscles stretch. Steve makes a quick, methodical sweep of the house, turning off lights and making sure windows and doors are locked.

She knows without asking that Bucky hasn’t returned from Sam’s yet; she can’t feel or smell him in the house, something that deeply unsettles her. They’ve all taken care not to spend too much time apart given how dangerous things have become, but while Sharon has taken elder meetings by phone and video conference, Bucky’s northern tasks often require short absences, especially since he’s begun negotiations with the Canadian packs.

(In the coming war, the Canadians will be the most valuable allies against the west, and Bucky is working hard to secure their allegiance. If Rumlow believes the Canadians willing to break their decades-long neutrality, particularly given the growing strength of Sharon’s territory, they may be able to stave off conflict entirely.)

This, at a day, is the longest he’s been gone. And it’s setting every nerve inside of Sharon on edge.

So when Steve shucks his shirt at the bottom of the stairs, his eyes beginning to flash as he moves into the shift, Sharon walks straight past him down the hall, away from the stairs.

“Sharon?” Steve’s voice is distant and confused as Sharon continues until she reaches his bedroom. No one has slept in this room for more than two months, and she’s pretty sure the sheets need to be changed desperately, but she drops down onto the bed anyway, kicking at the dusty top sheet until the clean fitted sheet is all she feels under her.

She can hear the irregular thump of his heartbeat at the door. Standing there, watching her.

“Bed,” she says, half into the mattress, lightly tapping the space beside her. 

He only hesitates a few moments before pulling his shirt back on over his head and dropping down onto the bed.

It’s weirdly awkward at first; they’ve slept together every night since Charleston, Steve’s body pressed up against her leg or hand, but this is the first time as human flesh and not fur. He arranges himself beside her so they aren’t touching, but doesn’t move away when Sharon shifts a bit closer, enough that her shoulder presses into his chest. She listens as his heart goes wild, then settles, soothing and steady.

It takes Sharon a shockingly short amount of time to drop into a deep, restful slumber.

A few hours later Sharon jolts awake at the feeling of the mattress dipping under her hip from the weight of another body on the bed. She panics for a second until she sucks in a deep breath and is flooded with Bucky’s comforting smell.

“Shh,” she hears Bucky whisper from behind her, a sudden flash of warmth as his body presses up against her back. “It’s okay. Go back to sleep.”

He noses at the nape of her neck, scenting her as he spoons up behind her, covering her body with his.

Bucky’s weight pushes her forward a bit, nudging her closer to Steve. In their sleep, they’ve curled around each other a bit more, Steve’s head low and near her breast, their legs tangled loosely.

Bucky’s hand slips over her hip and reaches until his fingers brush against Steve’s sleep-slackened ones.

 

\--

 

Eventually, the questions over meals become less banal and more pointed, particularly the meals Sharon and Steve share without Bucky.

Sharon is only moderately less hopeless than Steve at the culinary arts, but she makes a decent cheese and pepper omelette, and Steve can manage toast, so between them they make breakfast, relying on the coffee that Bucky blessedly made for them before he left for the day a half-hour earlier.

“Sharon?” Steve asks tentatively. “Why did you think I hated you?”

God, it feels like ages ago since they had that conversation at his cabin. She’s not sure why she told Steve she thought he hated her. It had been an emotional day, and in hindsight, she hadn’t really meant it, even in the moment. It wasn’t that she thought Steve hated her, more that it felt good saying it out loud, giving the distance between them a name. “I shouldn’t have said that. I’m sorry.”

Steve shakes his head. “No. That’s not an answer.”

He’s gotten a lot less delicate with her lately, pushing her on things she’d rather let lie.

Sharon leans forward, trying to not give in to the urge to look away from his face. “When Peggy died, I felt like I lost the two of you, too, that I lost the last bits of the family I loved. And I didn’t want to get Bucky back this way, to break up the last of _your_ family.”

“But you had to know you were part of that family, too.”

Sharon shakes her head. “Not the same, and you know it. I knew what bonding me meant he had give up, what you would have to give up,” she says. “The same way I had to give up the choice to bond to someone I loved.”

Steve’s face shifts into a look of confusion. “Was it that bad?” It’s easy, she thinks, to consider a bond nothing but a blessing when it has always been your choice. Men have never understood the burden of being a woman in a world controlled by men.

On this side of things, she doesn’t regret bonding to Bucky for an instant, but she tries to remember the sense of fear and sadness she felt that night Howard had taken her aside, told her about the plans to barter her to the west. The idea that her will could be sold so easily, that she would be pressed into something not of her own choosing, was terrifying. Bucky had not been the lesser of two evils - had not been an evil at all - but they had both made a choice under duress.

“It’s not a matter of bad or good. I didn’t know Bucky. It had been so long since we’d run together, so long since I’d run with you, too. I didn’t know either of you anymore.” Sharon goes quiet, unsure if she wants to share this with Steve, if it will cause more harm than good. In the end, she can’t be bothered with anything but honesty anymore. She is too tired to keep secrets. “I wanted what Peggy had. To be in love with the wolf I bonded to, for it to be a love match, instead of being traded for land and a lineage.”

She’s surprised to find Steve’s face still open, not shuttered or angry like she was expecting, so she continues. “I remember that night you took her north with you. She knew what she was risking - you must have, too.”

Steve nods.

“I wanted that. Childish? Maybe. But I wanted to love someone first.”

“What you have with Bucky,” Steve says, everything about his body strangely defensive. “That’s love, too.”

Sharon stands up, grabbing her plate and heading for the sink. She feels oddly petulant. “He didn’t have a choice either.”

“Stop,” Steve says, his voice harsh. “Bucky doesn’t love out of obligation. He’s not built like that.” He grabs his own dish and follows her to the sink, dropping it on the counter while Sharon grips her plate like a life preserver. “Do you love him because of the bond, because you were forced to make a choice? Because I know you love him.”

She’s cared for Bucky for as long as she’s known him, but the love is something that grew later, and as much she could pretend it was a matter of circumstance, that it was the natural conclusion of their lives being thrown together the way they were, she knows it isn’t true. And her greatest fear is that it only really flows one way, that his is a learned, forced love.

When it’s clear Sharon isn’t going to answer, Steve continues. “What Peggy and I had...” He takes a deep breath, hemming her in with his hands on either side of her on the counter. “It was just a different kind of love. Young. Impetuous. Free. It’s not the same kind I have for Bucky, either.” 

_The heart doesn't work like that_ , Sharon thinks as Steve says, “Or you.”

Sharon’s heartbeat goes wild, her entire chest seizing up with a mixture of shock and total disbelief. As she’s replaying the words in her head, Steve leans down slowly, slowly enough that if Sharon were in her right mind, she’d easily be able to duck away from his mouth as he presses his lips gently against hers.

Sharon loses her grip on her plate and it crashes to the floor, breaking into shards.

 

\--

 

“Steve’s worried he’s fucked up.” 

Bucky drops down into the grass beside her, his feet bare and jeans dirty at the knees. He sits close enough that their hips brush together when she shifts to pluck at the longer strands of grass.

She’s been avoiding Steve for most of the day, stupid excuses keeping her in different parts of the house or out in the garden that is half-dead from the chill of fall. Steve’s been polite enough to leave her be, but she can feel the tension between them, and it scares her; it’s been a while since it’s felt like this, a strained, awkward space between them.

Sharon’s been out in the farthest reaches of the backyard for the past hour, not far enough that he can’t see her, though. She’s been able to feel him watching her from the back windows. Given what they’ve been through, she has little desire to make him worry by disappearing. She doesn’t feel safe enough to wander far from the house without him, either.

“You didn’t know?” Bucky asks gently, touching the knee left bare by her dress. It’s chilly, the days getting shorter with the approaching winter, and Sharon isn’t sure if it’s the cold or Bucky’s touch that has a shiver running through her.

“You did?”

“Even if I couldn’t hear it in his head, he didn’t show up in Charleston to protect me, Sharon,” Bucky says. There’s a quiet moment before he continues. “And I could smell it on you. All the way back to that first night he stayed in the house.”

Sharon’s eyes go wide at the accusation.

For as long as she’s known Steve, she’s always thought of him as Peggy’s; he still carries her mark on his throat, and Sharon knows, without a doubt, there is a part of him that will never be touched by anyone other than her. It’s been more than five long years since Peggy died, but the idea of feeling what she does for Steve causes turmoil inside of her.

But she does. She’s spent months trying to pretend she doesn’t find comfort in Steve’s presence, that she doesn’t crave the feeling of his touch, that she doesn’t find happiness in watching him begin to recover, to become the man he had been before grief had warped him. Pretending that the love she’s started carrying for him is still familial. It isn’t. It hasn’t been for longer than she’s willing to admit.

Like Bucky can read her mind, he says, “After she died, the first time Steve and I…” Bucky’s voice drifts off a bit. “I felt like it was a betrayal of her, you know? But I knew what Steve needed and I was… I was very selfish.”

Sharon shakes her head, thinking back a year, how broken Bucky had been, too. A selfish man doesn’t put himself through that kind of torture. “It wasn’t selfish.”

“I just think about what I’d want for you or Steve if--” Bucky’s mouth snaps shut. “It’s not a betrayal. It’s not a betrayal to live, and I’d never want Steve to live the way he’s been living, I’d never want that for you, either.”

The quiet shock must show on her face because Bucky reaches out and slides his fingers between hers gently.

“I know I’m an idiot,” Bucky says with a sad smile. “Must be if you’ve gone on this long thinking I consider you some kind of duty.” He scrubs his face and lets out a haggard sigh. “I mean, _fuck_ , Sharon.”

“Bucky--”

“I love you,” Bucky says, his voice short and sharp like he won’t suffer any arguments. When Sharon tries to look away, uncomfortable, Bucky takes the hand not twined with hers and draws her face back. “I agreed to the bonding to protect you, to protect Steve, but I wouldn’t have taken it if I didn’t care for you, if I didn’t think it could grow to this. I thought you could feel it, the way I could feel you, the way you felt. I thought you knew.”

As Bucky presses his forehead to Sharon’s, she can feel eyes watching them from the house.

 

\--

 

By the time Sharon and Bucky come back into the house, Steve has already retreated to his room, the door shut for the first time Sharon can remember. Even upstairs in their bedroom, he’d let out a disgruntled growl if she or Bucky tried to close the door.

Bucky slips up to the second floor to change out of his dirty jeans as Sharon shoves the last of the dishes in the sink into the dishwasher, puts away the orange juice Steve must have left on the counter.

As if on autopilot, Sharon finds herself walking down the hallway to Steve’s room without making a conscious decision to.

She doesn’t knock before turning the knob, the old hinges way too loud to allow for any kind of stealth. As soon as the door opens, Steve props himself up on his elbows, his body lit by the dim, warm light of the setting sun.

“Sharon,” Steve says, his voice and eyes apologetic. It’s the moment Sharon stops caring, the same sense of surrender she felt when she saw that crib in the basement, when she understood the depth of Steve’s mourning, the weight of what Bucky had been carrying by himself for so many years.

_It is not a betrayal to live._

The look in Steve’s eyes shifts from apologetic to shocked in the second it takes Sharon to climb onto the mattress. This time there’s no awkwardness as she finds her place in his bed, tucking herself against him and pressing her head against his chest. The rhythmic thump of his heart in her ear is deeply soothing, the feel of his soft cotton shirt pressed between her fingers grounding her as she clings to him.

It takes a second for his arm to wrap around her waist, to tighten ever so gently.

She feels an excruciatingly pleasurable wave of warmth over the bond the moment Bucky steps over the threshold.

 

\--

 

It’s the first night of the full moon.

“Come run with us,” Bucky says, holding her wrist gently, leading her to the back door.

The fear is still there, living in the back of her head. The smell of blood and the crunch of bone, the safe haven that was violated so thoroughly. She remembers the wrench of jaws and how it sounded to hear her own screams.

She starts to pull against Bucky’s hold when a warm, solid mass presses up along her back. Steve’s hands find her hips, the touch warm and reassuring.

“Run with us,” Steve whispers in her ear.

 

\--

 

Running. She’s missed this. The uneven feel of the dirt beneath her feet, the cold bite of the autumn air, the leaves that crunch as her paws land on them. The beat of her heart as it races right along with her, the land eaten up beneath her feet in a way she’ll never feel as a human. The jubilant sounds of Bucky and Steve beside her, growling and yipping in turn, the pant of breath as they chase one another through the dark hills lit solely by the moon. The perfect smell of land that belongs to her and the wolves she loves, the sound of the water against the shore, against her body as they dash across the shallowest part of the river, where it goes rocky and warm before it drains into the small lake. The feel of Bucky intentionally bumping into her, throwing her off balance as Steve tries to steal the lead, the rough bark Steve lets out when Bucky nips at his tail. The pull of the moon at her wolf, like it’s a tide under its power, the blank peacefulness of something that feels so purely natural that Sharon wants nothing more than to lose herself to it. 

She’s missed this freedom.

 

\--

 

They’re barely in the door when Sharon shifts out of the wolf, the shaggy fur replaced with shivering, pale skin. She doesn’t even have time to turn around before an entirely human body presses up to her back, acres of bare, warm skin up against hers. The smell tells her instantly that it’s Bucky, that it’s his mouth pressed to the side of her neck, teeth still a little sharper than normal playing over his bond mark.

Steve’s still shifting off the last of the wolf when he steps in front of her. Sharon expects roughness, the kind of feral touching she’s used to with Bucky when they fuck after the shift, but he shocks her with his gentleness, his touch firm but not rough as he tips her head back and kisses her.

It’s nothing like the tentative kiss they shared in the kitchen, soft and hesitant. This kiss is consuming, overwhelming in a way Sharon wasn’t expecting. She lets out a soft gasp when Steve nudges her mouth open gently, his tongue touching hers, and Bucky’s hands clutch at her tighter.

The hands on her hips are replaced by an arm banded around her waist, steadying her as the kiss with Steve deepens, the world slowly dropping away as everything centers in on his mouth. His hands are cupping her cheeks, his thumbs drawing back and forth over her cheekbones.

By the time she and Steve pull back for a proper breath, Sharon realizes Bucky’s guided them into Steve’s room, though for the life of her, she can’t remember taking a single step. Steve licks his swollen lips and everything inside her goes molten, her body fully awake, pressed between the warm bulk of Steve and Bucky.

They kiss briefly over Sharon’s shoulder, Bucky’s body shaking with a tremor when Sharon reaches up and touches the powerful line of his throat. Bucky’s hand at the back of Steve’s neck guides Steve’s mouth back to Sharon, and he’s kissing her again, a little rougher this time, his hands planted on her hips. 

Sharon lets out a short mewl of protest when the warmth of Bucky’s body disappears from behind her, but Steve bites down on her lip with just enough pressure to cause a sting. In retaliation, she sets her nails into the thick muscles of his back, and it seems to wake him up, the gentleness of earlier replaced with a frantic urgentness.

Steve bears her down on the bed, following her down and pressing her into the mattress. “Okay?” he asks, catching her eyes as the arm not bent to keep his full weight off her slips between their bodies to feel at her cunt.

Sharon nods, adding, “Yes,” when his fingers still, apparently not appeased by her non-verbal consent. His blunt fingers run over her folds, slick enough already that there’s barely any friction. Though it seems wrong to compare them, her mind does drift to how different it feels with Steve; while Bucky enjoys to tease, there’s nothing like that in Steve’s touch. It’s deliberate and assured, testing what feels good and giving it to her, where Bucky had been more happy to withhold, to make her work for it.

“Bucky?” Sharon asks quietly, disoriented. She can’t see him, though Steve’s shoulders block out most of her vision.

Fingers drag along the inside of her forearm as Steve settles properly between her legs. “Yeah,” Bucky answers, tucking in beside her on the bed, kissing her as she feels the head of Steve’s cock drag against her thigh.

Steve’s careful as he presses into her, his forehead resting against her temple as he slowly fills her. The last time she’d had Bucky in her had been shortly before Charleston, and while Steve isn’t much bigger than Bucky, it’s still a stretch. He lets her body settle around him before whispering, _Okay?_ in her ear, this time accepting her nod of consent before starting to move.

It doesn’t take long for the waves of pleasure to begin to peak. The newness of Steve’s body against her, the muscle memory of the shift, the exquisite pressure of Steve’s cock inside her all ripping her body apart in the most delicious of ways. His thrusts are deep and slow in a way that makes her want to completely unravel, like she’s a stitch being yanked from the inside. The intense way he is watching her as she comes apart is what finally drives her over the edge, her toes curling and back bending up until she feels like she’s going to snap in half.

He slows a bit, drawing out her orgasm in a way that feels incredible, makes her eyes squeeze shut with the ferocity of the feeling.

When she finally opens her eyes again, Steve is half-shifted, his teeth sharper than human, dragging over her skin. When he pulls his head back, she can see his eyes have shifted to the wolf. She can see the question in them too, the same as Bucky’s on that beach what feels like a lifetime ago. Unlike that night, there’s no uncertainty, no nervousness, no question where she stands, what she wants. Only her hesitation to let herself have it.

Whatever was holding her back isn’t anymore. “Yes,” Sharon says out loud, answering the unasked question.

Steve fits his mouth over the mark Bucky left in her flesh and presses down until the skin breaks again, until she can smell the sharp, metallic bite of blood in the air, overwhelming the saltier scent of sex. Sharon lets out a soft gasp of pain before Bucky leans in and kisses her, holds her face and whispers things she can’t hear over the rushing of blood in her ears as Steve’s hips go brutal, letting out a pained, shuddering gasp against her throat as he comes.

When he kisses her, pulling out slowly and shifting his body so he’s no longer on top of her, she can taste blood.

“You okay?” Bucky asks into the thin skin under her ear, his hand settling gently over her pussy, feeling Steve’s come slide out of her.

“Yes.” Sharon’s a little sore and wet enough between her release and Steve’s that she knows Bucky fucking her now will be a messy affair. But she wants him, wants to feel the bond open and warm between them, so she drags him by the neck to kiss her, her intentions clear by the way Bucky kiss goes deep immediately, the way his fingers press and test, like he’s making sure she’s not too sore for what they both want.

As Bucky climbs over her, lifting her legs and hooking them over his hips as he presses into her so slowly she can barely stand it, she can hear Steve’s voice in the back of her head, a strange, unfamiliar warmth coming over the bond.

_Sharon._

 

\--

 

_“Father’s angry,” Sharon says, unpacking her things into the first two drawers of a dresser that seems to hold most of Bucky’s clothes. She can smell his scent caught in cotton and thinks idly about stealing one of the shirts to wear to bed that night._

_“Father can piss right off,” Peggy says unrepentantly. Though Howard hadn’t forbidden Sharon from seeing Peggy, their father had made it impossible for Sharon to visit while the matter of Peggy’s bonding with Steve was being debated and approved by the Council. “Thought he could sell me off like Angela and Beatrice.” Peggy takes a deep breath and slowly turns her scowl into a sad smile. “I won’t let him do that to you, either.”_

_Sharon doesn’t much care for her father, but she can’t imagine him ever doing something like that, despite the cruelty he’s shown Peggy over the last year._

_“You love him?” Sharon asks, though she already knows the answer. Sharon adores Steve, who has always treated her like an equal, and knows just how deep Peggy’s love for him runs. It’s a loaded question, and because Peggy knows her so well, she answers the real one hidden behind Sharon’s attempt to be diplomatic._

_Between all her sisters, Peggy’s always been the pragmatic one, the one to weigh consequences, the one to follow her head. She’ll never compromise, always be headstrong like Sharon is, but disappearing in the middle of the night with a wolf - a regent, no less - and ending up bonded without the assent of the Council? It seems reckless, even for someone as headstrong as Peggy._

Is it worth it? _is the real question Sharon wants to ask. Their father has renounced Peggy as a Carter, removed any chance her lineage could carry the name she grew up with or run the lands that she did as a girl. She is an exile from her own pack as punishment for breaking the Council’s rules. For breaking their father’s rules._

_“One day you will understand,” Peggy says. “You can’t choose who you love. The heart doesn’t work like that.”_

 

\--

 

In the summer, Sharon gives birth to a healthy baby boy.

An alpha with beautiful blue eyes.

 


End file.
